


I Will Rebuild My City (With My Bare Hands If I Must)

by FlyingPigPoet



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Supergirl/Agents of SHIELD crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-08
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2018-11-29 12:24:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 50
Words: 33,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11440806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlyingPigPoet/pseuds/FlyingPigPoet
Summary: This starts right after the end of Season Two (my version, from the Implications of Your Heartbreak) and may refer to some antics from Pink Kryptonite. Basically, I am considering both the level of physical destruction that the Battle of National City caused, and also all the trauma that all of the characters have suffered in the last two seasons, but particularly at the end of Season two.When your city was almost destroyed and you almost lost everyone you loved, how do you put yourself back together? How do you mend relationships stretched to the breaking point by war?This goes right up until just before the beginning of Season Three.





	1. Invasions Lead to Paperwork

J'onn J'onzz sat in a booth at Dollywood, papers spread out around him. The reconstruction of National City, and especially of the DEO headquarters, was ongoing and loud, both auditorially and emotionally, so the bar was one of the few places he could get any work done. M'gann brought him another chocolate milkshake and a copy of the Tribune. The top stories were unsurprising. The Supers were helping all over the city, tearing down the more dangerous of the half-destroyed buildings. L-Corp had donated a high-tech lead filtration system for the city's water supply. LordTech had converted its high-speed passenger train into a freight line to get supplies to National City faster. The NCPD was reporting a decrease in looting but a steady level of anti-alien hate crimes. All over National City aliens and humans were working side by side to clear the rubble left behind by the Daxamite invasion. Etc., etc.

What the Tribune didn't report on was the swarm of DEO agents all over the city trying to locate and secure as many Daxamite weapons as they could. Other governmental organizations were gathering the Daxamite dead for a respectful and anonymous mass burial outside the city. J'onn was grateful that his already traumatized agents didn't have to face that particular hell, and that it was the DEO that would be confiscating and archiving the weapons. He had Vasquez's memo to thank for that. He pulled the original hand-written sheets out from under more recent papers and read it again.

"RE: President Marsden's Speech. Director, I am interpreting the president's 'all hands on deck' speech to mean we are going to face a perfect storm of interdepartmental 'cooperation.' On a municipal level, that won't be a problem. Detective Sawyer had been appointed Acting Special FBI Liaison, and we have developed decent rapport with the NCPD Regular and Science Divisions."

J'onn nodded. Detective Sawyer had been liaising tirelessly as the police strove to prevent looting and stop the anti-alien hate crimes. Those first days since the Daxamites had left had been almost as messy as the invasion itself. It was why he had asked Agent Vasquez for this assessment in the first place. Forty minutes later, she had handed him several sheets of paper torn from a spiral bound notebook, covered in her meticulous printing. 

"Well, that was quick," he'd said to her. "Are you sure you don't need more time to consider--"

"Sir," the exhausted agent had said. "With all due respect, I never go anywhere without a pen." She unsnapped her cargo pants pocket and pulled out a wad of napkins with the Dollywood logo on them, covered with notes and lists scribbled in blue ballpoint. "And that includes firefights. I've been thinking about this stuff all week."

Her disgust at his lack of faith had come off her in waves, which surprised him. He hadn't felt this much emotion coming from her in a long time. "Did you lose your telepathic disrupter, Agent Vasquez?"

"The alien boy, Marcus, shorted it out, sir."

"Hmm. That's probably just as well. You've gotten out of the habit of policing your feelings. I know you're tired--we all are--but you were never an open book before. Perhaps it's better if you don't rely on technology. Just in case--"

"I'm ever captured by a telepath. Yes, sir, I see your point."

"Having said that, you should know I put Winn on rebuilding dampeners at a number of scales, including two that are earmarked for wedding presents should such an eventuality...eventuate..." He had said it very seriously, of course, but her reaction had nearly caused him to laugh.

Sighing, he sat reading the memo again. Her usual style was steady, measured, and formal. This was the other Vasquez. Trenches Vasquez rather than Desk Vasquez, he supposed.

"On the national level is where things will get complicated. We have unofficial liaisons with the local FBI, people who have been cleared at high levels, and/or have been threatened with the Danvers finger. However, we will undoubtedly be joined in our efforts to protect and rebuild National City by the agents of SHIELD. I am willing (but not enthusiastic) to act as the liaison, since I worked with them before. Expect the butting of heads. I strongly recommend filling out a Jurisdictional Point Request form in advance. Emphasize your long experience with the people/infrastructure of National City. Treat Director Coulson and Assistant Director May with respect and we should be okay."


	2. Not the Call You Expected

When Eliza's phone rang at eleven a.m. on Sunday, she was all ready to grill Alex about how hard Kara was working, and whether they were taking the necessary precautions so that she didn't solar flare. She was prepared to tell Alex that if only she took more responsibility at work, maybe she would get a promotion, finally. There was something about J'onn J'onzz having let the DEO be attacked during the Battle of New York, but Eliza never got around to that one. 

She never really got around to any of it.

"Hi, Mom! It's Alex! I know we usually talk on Sundays, but we've been working 24/7 here and so I can't really talk long because it have to--no, put that over there, then sign the waiver--finish up some of the construction so we can get our satellite system back on line and--tell Winn I said by noon at the latest!--get back to our real job of patrolling the city. Kara is back at work with us again, so you don't have to worry about her blowing out her powers, we are keeping close track of that, even though she complains about it all the time, but I got J'onn to slip in a line item to the DEO budget for potstickers. You won't believe it, he seriously squeezed them into Engineering under the title Beaker Insertion Units, says he can't stand lying if he doesn't have to."

Eliza interrupted hurriedly, "Sweetie, it's good to hear from you. How are--"

"We're really great, Mom, thanks for asking. Vasquez has even cooked for me, like, three times this week when I got home late because I am picking up all the slack since J'onn has been called back to Washington yet again and he leaves me in charge--Shit, Vas, get a team together, Winn can give you the coordinates. Tell Supergirl to do aerial but not to engage until you give the word--Sorry, Mom, more aliens making trouble, and more anti-alien protestors making other kinds of trouble. Why weren't more people raised like you and Dad raised us? Anyway, I have to go soon, but life is amazing. I think I may have even discovered an alien element that we haven't seen before. It's all over the places where the Daxamites died, and may have biochemical components that break down when--Oh, shit! Another one? Solomon, prep a team for me and I'll take point. No, keep Supergirl with Vasquez's team, her problem is more urgent. Sorry, Mom, I gotta go! Love you!"

And Eliza stared at her phone in shock. She had been watching the news from National City, and most of the anchors were portraying the burials, cleanup, reconstruction, and grieving as a slow, torturous and above all depressing situation. Alex sounded like she was having the time of her life. Well, the good news was if Alex was happy, Kara was probably happy too. Eliza returned to her lab relieved.


	3. Reimagining the Future

Lena Luthor set the hardhat that the architect had given her on her head. She wore a black pantsuit and low black heels as she followed the woman through the construction site, listening to the plans and the possibilities. The attack by the Daxamites had been destructive but, in this one single instance, that was going to save L-Corp some serious money, since the deconstruction that had to happen before construction could start had, well, happened, thanks to Daxamite blasters and they were also getting more FEMA funding to cover some of the costs as well.

The clinic would start small, just an emergency room, a pediatric department, and general medicine. She knew the alien population of National City had mixed feelings about the motives of a Luthor. So she would start with just the basics that were so sorely needed, take a little pressure off the two human hospitals that had been trying to handle the alien needs on an ad-hoc basis.

She also hoped that the successful half-dozen trials with the prosthetic skin that Winn had helped Kate and Ron develop would ad a few points in her favor, convince people that she really did just want to help.

Her phone rang. It was Jess. She excused herself to take the call. "Jess, I'm still on site with Evans."

"I know, Ms. Luthor. Just wanted to give you a heads up. Good news, bad news. The National City Chamber of Commerce has recommended you to the mayor for an award. Pro- and anti-alien groups are fighting it."

"Of course they are," sighed Lena. "Get PR to handle it."

"Also, Winn called. He has ideas about using the quantum material for temporary roofing on some of the reconstruction sites. I think it would be prohibitively expensive, but I told him I'd mention it."

"I trust your judgment, Jess. Tell Harlowe to look into it but not to take too much time on it."

"Will do. And Kara had to cancel lunch." She did not say "again."

Lena grunted.

"She sounded exhausted," Jess hurried on. "I asked Winn if he could bring over one of the DEO's portable sunlamps, for you to keep at the condo."

"Good thinking. Thank you, Jess."

Lena tried not to think about the fact that Kara hadn't been to the condo in weeks. Instead, she hung up, grateful for her marvel of a secretary. She flicked through her phone to find the picture Jess had insisted on that night at the end of the karaoke fundraiser for Dollywood. Lena and Kara stood surrounded by J'onn, M'gann, Alex, Vasquez, Lucy, Maggie, James, Winn, Jess, and, for some reason, Brian. Kate from R&D had taken the picture and Jess had said in no uncertain terms that whenever Lena thought of her mother's assertion that Lena had no one behind her or with her, she should look at that picture.

Lena looked at it now and it gave her the burst of energy she needed to put her phone away and return to her architect.

I am a force for good, she repeated silently to herself. And, gosh darn it, people like me.


	4. Reaching for the Brass Ring

Brian the blue alien was an optimist, an opportunist, and a gambler, in that order. And he knew people who knew people. So, rather than seeing the dark days following the Battle of National City as a bad thing, Brian saw it as a way to finally get ahead. He wandered around the city, watching. He watched National Guard crews dealing with broken infrastructure around the clock. He watched construction crews dealing with broken buildings around the clock. He watched the city's reporters, doctors and lawyers dealing with... their stuff around the clock. 

And they all looked exhausted, but he had figured out a way to help. He went to Star City, where the Energizer Rooster power drink had gotten its start and made a pitch to be National City's go-to guy for wholesale Rooster. He would sell to the convenience store chains and the gym chains and the unions. Hell, he loved the stuff, so he could sell it to anybody, human and alien alike.

And probably he had never heard the term carpetbagger, because he'd only been in the States for three years, and on Earth for four, but he probably wouldn't have cared. War meant profit. Reconstruction meant profit. And profit meant he might finally get out of his basement one-bedroom apartment with the squeaky sink. And as far as he was concerned, this was an unalloyed good thing.


	5. All Her Pieces Blowing Away

In the days following the Battle of National City, Supergirl was flying steel beams across construction sites by day and writing articles about the ongoing reconstruction by night. Snapper had come back from his medical leave of absence since the kidnapping and although he growled less than he had, she often saw him rubbing his eyes as if struggling to focus his vision, and she worried about whether he had suffered permanent damage. Cat had asked Kara to return to CatCo "for the duration of the crisis" and Kara had been glad to come back. After the devastation, she would feel frivolous writing about food rather than the brave people of National City struggling to get their lives back. Millie Bernetti not only told her she would have her job back afterwards, but also donated food for her and Superman. Working together, Kara and her cousin had taken down most of the buildings that had been on the verge of collapse, including City Hall, in the first few days. Batman and Captain America were helping out by filling in for Superman back in Metropolis, but Kal-El said he had to get back home soon, now that the biggest and most urgent jobs were done. The humans would have to do the rest for themselves.

Personally, Kara dreaded going back to a regular routine while the city still felt far from regular. All the rubble around her was a reminder of her failures. All the bright yellow construction vehicles were reminders of the bright lights that had strobed the city as the Daxamite ships patrolled above.

She tried to think of what she might have done differently. It's not like they could have left Mon-El asleep in his pod. She might have simply let Alex use the positron cannon, but it just went against the grain to kill thousands rather than giving them the chance to surrender. Anyway, from what Kara could glean from the DEO files, the woman who helped Lena build the portal had been on Earth for years before Mon-El had even arrived.

So maybe she couldn't have prevented the invasion, but she still felt vaguely responsible, vaguely guilty, as if once more she was helpless, watching her home be destroyed.

So she helped rebuild by day and by night, she wrote.

She wrote about National Guard crews rebuilding infrastructure. She wrote about volunteers at food shelters. She wrote about Lena's filter to get the lead out of the city's water system. She wrote about people being reunited with families and lost animals. She wrote about the architects planning the new city hall. And then Cat has asked her to go interview Lena Luthor about the new alien hospital. Kara had not seen Lena since the morning after the battle. They had returned to Lena's place around midnight, torn off each other's clothes and had hungry, rough, "I thought I would never see you again" sex, slept like the dead and then the next morning, Lena, always true to her word, made Kara tons of waffles.

But that had been weeks ago. Kara wasn't even sure what day it was, and she was generally too tired these days to do anything like addition or subtraction, so she didn't know how many weeks. Too long. 

She had not been avoiding her, exactly. And they texted a few times a week, checking in. But Kara felt so fragile that she had to spend the majority of her time proving to the world that she was still the Girl of Steel. Proving it to herself. She feared that if she let herself see Lena's green eyes, let herself melt into Lena's arms, she might just collapse, all her pieces blowing away on the wind, the way Rhea's had.

And if Kara didn't know better, she might have thought that Cat knew. But given that Kara had seen Cat for maybe a few minutes more than she'd seen Lena lately, that was unlikely. All of National City was working overtime 24/7 and the Queen of All Media was no exception. So Cat probably didn't know the depth of Kara's distress. Couldn't know.

Right?


	6. The Observer Changes the Experiment

Winn Schott, Jr. was smart. Maybe not genius-level, but way above average. He also played the piano pretty well, and that made going to concerts to see world-class pianists a joy, to watch someone do something he understood but do it that much better than he could ever imagine doing it.

That was how he felt while watching Jillian Holtzman in the lab. Holtzy had dismantled one of the Daxamite lance-like blasters and was diagramming it and taking notes. He suspected that any other brilliant engineer would be muttering to herself while doing these things. Not Holtzy. She was dancing to very loud disco music: the BeeGees, ABBA, Leo Sayers.

"Yo got a sweet way of talking, bud unh unh unh bah bah! Yo've got a spell ovah me!"

Winn watched, transfixed. She could even dance while she was taking apart alien technology that she had never seen before in a way that reminded him of Alex and Vasquez competing to see who could strip down and rebuild their guns faster. It was a beautiful thing to watch. When her playlist finally came to an end, she did a spin and then saw him standing by the door.

"Hey! If it isn't my boy, Schottzy! What can I do you for, babe?"

"That's Agent Schottzy, to you Holtzman," he said with a smile. "J'onn wants to know where you are on the Daxamite weapons."

"Well, I already took apart the sidearm, fun fact, it's actually not a deadly weapon. It looks like it's only for knocking someone out, probably with a dendrotoxin--I did not know they had that on other worlds. But the rifle/lance/blaster piece of work has levels from stun all the way to melt-with-liquid-fire, but I'm pretty sure that last one, if it were used, would be a suicide-and-destroy-all-evidence kind of a doohickey, and none of the B-Lances I've seen look like they used it."

"Okay, write it up for your report. I'll give J'onn the ten-cent version. Thanks, Holtzy."

"You are verra welcome, Agent Schottzy!"

Winn shook his head as he moved through the DEO. He had time before his meeting with J'onn, so he passed by medical and visited with a few of the many, many agents who had been injured in the battle. He had been surprised earlier by the low mortality rate, but had at first put it down to the excellent training of DEO agents. Now he wasn't so sure, but he didn't let it show as he wished his acquaintances a speedy recovery. He was thoughtful as he made his way from there to the command center, where Alex and Vasquez already waited.

Supergirl flew in through the reconstructed balcony, and he thought he saw her stumble and then recover, but maybe it was just a trick of the light. She strode to the round conference table confidently, cape as always making her look even more impressive. Winn gave himself a small pat on the back for that. But it was odd, Winn thought. Even when Kara was in super mode, she was still usually Sunny Danvers. But today she seemed both solemn and impatient. There was no crinkle, but she frowned and her hands fidgeted at her sides.

J'onn ambled over, exactly on time. He was the only one not showing signs of weariness, but perhaps Martians showed it differently. "Agents," he said in greeting. "Bring me up to speed. Agent Danvers?"

"Sir, we have taken sixteen rogue aliens into custody, most of them for getting into altercations with anti-alien humans who are trying to use the invasion as an excuse to deport aliens, maybe ban them. "

Supergirl scowled. "What happened to the humans?"

"NCPD has them. One fight happened at a demonstration at the mayor's temporary office. They don't want her to give Lena Luthor that award."

"What award?" asked Supergirl.

Vasquez said, "The Chamber of Commerce nominated her for it, for saving the city. Again. Didn't she tell you?"

Supergirl shook her head. "She's humble," she said evasively.

Vasquez and Winn shared a look.

J'onn said, "Agent Vasquez?" 

"The mayor is condemning the violence, saying that perpetrators of all species will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Won't help. People are still scared and I've been seeing flyers--not Cadmus, too low-tech for Lillian, but imitators, sure. And they can be just as effective at riling people. Demonstrations, altercations, they're not going to stop. We're going to need to help the NCPD. I've already called Detective Sawyer. She's coming by tomorrow."

"Good. Supergirl? We're going to need you to come off construction and come back to the front lines with us."

"Sir, as an alien, I really shouldn't fight anti-alien humans."

"Agreed. But there's plenty of other kinds of crimes and both we and the NCPD will be a bit busy. It's time for you to come back home."

"Yes, sir."

Winn raised his eyebrows. He had expected her to protest. He and Alex shared a look.

"Agent Schott? Where are we on the Daxamite weapons?"

"Yes, sir. Well, I took an aerial shot of all the troop ships and calculated how many Daxamite--"

"Don't need to know your methods, Agent Schott."

"Right. Well, I estimate that we have collected 93% of the active weapons. If they were damaged, it will be much harder to follow the energy signature."

"But even a damaged weapon would be problematic in the wrong hands," said Vasquez.

Alex fake-coughed, "Max Lord!"

"But Holtzman has pointed out that the weapons go from relatively benign stunning to full-out liquid fire. So I think it's fair to say that the Daxamites saw the usefulness of both less and more violence, unlike human weapons that can pretty much just kill."

Alex and Vasquez shared a look. J'onn said, "You mean as opposed to enslavement on the one end and genocide on the other?"

Winn opened and closed his mouth. "Well, when you put it like that..."

After the briefing, Winn called his girlfriend. "Hey, Jess. You got a minute? Quick question. Have you noticed anything odd about Kara lately?"

"Winn, I haven't seen Kara since the invasion. I don't think Lena has either."

"What? Don't tell me they've broken up? They had the greatest love in history!"

"I don't think it's that. Listen, maybe we can go out for dinner tonight, do a double date, see how that goes..."

"I have to work tonight. Maybe tomorrow?"

"Lena has to give a speech tomorrow. I need to be there. What's your Friday look like?"

"Barring alien invasion, I'm free. Wow. When did that become a reasonable sentence to say?"

Jess chuckled. "Our lives are unlike regular people's lives. Noonan's at six and Dollywood after?"

"You got it." And yes, National City was a total wreck, and its people were all pretty darn traumatized, but gosh darn it if Winn's life wasn't the best it had been in years.


	7. All the Stories Except Yours

Lena woke up that morning, as she had every morning since the Daxamites had retreated, to reach over to the other side of her bed, hoping. But again, it was empty. She left the balcony door unlocked, just in case Supergirl decided to stop in. Lena watched the TV news now, regularly, not to find out about business and weather but to catch a glimpse of the woman she hoped was still her girlfriend after... everything.

On the one hand, it made no sense. Lena had saved them all. Why would Kara blame her? And yet...

Lena's mother had tried to strand Kara on the Daxamite ship and told Kara's sister to blow it up. And the device, Lex's device that Lillian had found and Lena and Winn had made work, well, that was the device that made Earth toxic for Kara's (Lena gritted her teeth as she thought it) ex-boyfriend, even if it did save the planet. And Lillian and Cadmus took the credit. So maybe Kara did have a reason to blame Lena, a Luthor, for the way things were.

And as Lena watched, the Channel Seven news anchor tell of the human and superhuman feats of reconstruction going on all over the city: wrecked cars towed from the streets, buildings rebuilt, roads repaved, the maimed and injured getting on with their lives. A story on Max Lord's newest smart prosthetic limbs. Every now and then in the background, a flash of red and blue.

//

Lena's driver, Tom, knew better than to initiate a conversation with her, especially in the morning commute when she was gearing up for a long day. But when he held the car door for her at L-Corp, he said, "Have a good day, ma'am," like an actor who has one line in a play and gives it his all. She smiled at him, then turned and put on her Luthor Against the World face, and entered her building.

It was odd to think of it like that, her building, but it really was, in a way, since L-Corp, her reinvention of LuthorCorp, its new mission, products, the idea and the physical infrastructure, had spring from her brain to take form here. Even a large portion of its employees were new, since many of Lex and Lionel's people had chosen not to leave Metropolis. So these people were hers. She took heart at the thought as she crossed the lobby, busy already at 8 a.m. The security guards greeted her with genuine smiles.

In the elevator, a pair of employees who apparently didn’t see her were chatting about “one of Lex’s old devices, yeah, from the bad old days…” Lena took out her phone with a sigh, flicking through her emails and ignoring the rest of the conversation. As they got out, she heard a muttered, “Oh, shit, it’s her…” She maintained the Haughty Luthor face as the elevator rose and gradually emptied. Finally, she reached her floor, where Jess was arguing with someone over the phone, looking harassed.

“Yes, I am aware of the traffic problems. I emailed you two alternate routes last night. How do you stay in business if you don’t read your—“

Jess handed Lena a handwritten version of the day’s agenda, since she was busily stabbing at her tablet as she spoke. “Well, if your company is incapable of performing its contractual obligations, L-Corp will switch to a company that can!” She hit her earpiece and pinched the bridge of her nose.

“Steady on, Jess,” said Lena.

“Sorry, Ms. Luthor. Incompetence just depresses me.”

"Me, too, Jess," said Lena, glancing down at the piece of paper in her hands. "Um, you forgot to put in my lunch with..."

"No, sorry, Ms. Luthor. She called..."

"To cancel. Again."

"To be fair, she always sounds so, so tired. I thought about mentioning it to Winn, or maybe calling Alex..."

Lena stared. "Why? Just because she cancelled a few dates? That is hardly something to bring in the National Guard about. Or DEO. Whatever."

Jess frowned, but nodded. "Check. No National Guard. On the upside, FEMA's check cleared overnight and the consultants from Wayne Enterprises are due in the conference room at three."

Lena sighed. "That's great news." She knew that she didn't sound elated but she also knew that Jess knew damn well why not and didn't judge her. She took the day's agenda and marched into her office. Work awaited.


	8. Things Aren't Always What They Appear to Be

Alex sat in J’onn’s office filling out paperwork. Since the Battle of National City, the paperwork part of her and J’onn’s jobs had doubled, and J’onn made it clear that he was starting to believe in delegating as much as possible. Alex actually didn’t mind. Although she enjoyed the lab part of her job best, and really quite liked being a badass, she was also an extremely detail-oriented person. This was like the best part of being back in school without the pesky grades.

Her phone pinged.

JHuang: Your sister is overworking. You need to check in with her.

It took Alex a moment to remember Lena's secretary. She texted back.

AgentD: Everyone is overworking.

JHuang: She's cancelled every lunch with Lena. For three weeks.

AgentD: Oh.

JHuang: This is serious.

AgentD: I'll add that to my list.

JHuang: You bloody well better.

Alex stared at her phone, pictured the small, fierce Chinese-American woman who guarded Lena's fortress. Then she pictured her sunny sister insisting on flying back and forth across town in the previous weeks, smile firmly in place. But Alex knew that the smile was often a result of Kara having seen Lena, having eaten a meal with her, forcing Lena to remember to take breaks and eat. It had not occurred to Alex that the smile could possibly be Lena-free. She wasn't even sure that that was possible. Still staring at her phone, she typed a message.

AgentLabRat: Hey, we haven't had sister night in a while. Do you need a short break as much as I do?

The answer didn't come immediately, which Alex thought was a bad sign. Half an hour later, her phone pinged.

AgentPotsticker: Sure, but there's no TIME. There's just SO MUCH to do.

And there were absolutely zero emojis. Alex thought carefully, strategically. Finally, she typed:

AgentLabRat: V went with JJ to DC, so I'm all alone tonight. Got a BOGO coupon for Antonio's Pizza... 7?

AgentPotsticker: 9. Okay, maybe 8. I'm starving.

Alex sent a text to Jess:

AgentD: I will fix it this evening. Thanks for letting me know.


	9. Equal Opportunity Employment

Ernest Thornhill couldn’t catch a break. Originally, he had moved his corporation from Metropolis to National City, figuring that the city with the newest superhero would require a construction company ready to jump at the first sign of super-destruction. The first year had pretty much been what he had expected: villain of the week destruction, fires one week, electricity damage the next, maybe a small earthquake.

He had not been prepared for intergalactic warfare, not at this level. It had been one thing the year before when the dozen or so Kryptonians had taken over everyone’s minds. But this past year, the Daxamite situation had been a full-blown invasion, and who planned for things like that? And sure, the company had insurance for acts of God and rogue super villains, but it didn’t cover urban warfare.

And politicians always promised to create jobs, but the people who really created jobs were the villains, particularly the supervillains. But National City was currently at 104% employment, and Thornhill Reconstruction needed workers, strong workers, not idea people. Someone had given him this woman’s card, and he was a little bit desperate.

She sat behind her desk taking notes: twenty people, physically strong, no previous construction experience necessary. “I think we can find that for you, Mr. Thornhill,” she says. “Just one thing. How do you feel about aliens?”

“As long as they’re legal, I don’t care what planet they’re from. I have jobs to do and I need the people to do them.”

“Excellent. I think you’ll find that Sinclair Personnel Solutions is the answer to all your problems.”

And admittedly, the workers she ended up sending him were varying shades of green, but they were hard workers and they got the job done, so he wasn’t going to complain.


	10. Your Safest Place

During the Battle of National City, Dollywood had been the best-protected piece of property in the entire metro area, better than the DEO, better than L-Corp. The banks had had the NCPD protecting them. City Hall and the utilities companies had had the Army protecting them.

M'gann's bar had the DEO protecting it. And the thing about the NCPD and the Army was that they were simply doing their jobs. For the DEO, protecting their watering hole was deeply, deeply personal. You could kill a man's squad but you did not, not, not mess with his bartender.

It was humbling, really. It was also why M'gann had opened her first tavern right at the end of the Revolution, in Philadelphia. The members of the Constitutional Congress were firm believers in democracy, separation of church and state, and alcohol, not always in that order. M'gann had impersonated a portly white man she had known before the war, and poured and poured and poured. She liked to think that she had some small part in the writing of the US Constitution.

The Civil War was similar. Hell, all the wars were similar. People came to bars to talk, to relax, to connect with each other, especially during difficult times. Prohibition had been a pain but it was more than made up for by the bar culture of the next six decades, before the doctors had come down on two-hour martini lunches and the Reagan backlash had pushed a lot of the nonstandard folks--queers, aliens, the lot--back into the closet.

And now here she was, with the one other member of her species sitting in a booth doing paperwork to avoid the over-emotionalism of humans, and the headaches that always caused. Well, that's what he told himself he was doing, what he told anyone who asked. But M'gann knew J'onn better than the humans. She knew why he was really there.


	11. Hood/Winked

Maxwell Lord was a problem solver. A lot of doctors, scientists and engineers said that, but with Max it was really true. He got into a problem before it presented itself and he engineered a solution in time to solve the problem once it presented. Admittedly, there had been a few times (Bizarro, Red K) when he hadn't quite exactly framed the problem correctly and had more or less solved the wrong problem.

And people like Agent Alex Danvers would have argued that solving the wrong problem was pretty much the same as causing a problem that shouldn't have happened at all. But that was neither here nor there.

During the Daxamite invasion, he had mostly been abroad gathering epidemiological data, interviewing generals in questionably legal regimes, wining and dining female scientists and stealing their results along with whatever virtue they might have had...

To Max that was not him being the problem. That was him being the solution.

And he had been impressed with the Luthor's attempt at freeing National City and the world from the Daxamites. Clearly, he would have handled it faster, better, less toxically, but still. Kudos.

And when the organization Cadmus had taken the credit for the solution, on the one hand he had seen right through it. He had dossiers on Luthor senior and junior, the female version, and he knew who was the genius in that family, and it wasn't the older woman.

But Lillian Luthor did remind him an awful lot of Cat Grant. Not morally, of course. Cat was Neutral Good. Lillian was Lawful Evil. Max considered himself Chaotic Neutral most of the time. Maybe Lawful Neutral occasionally. He could understand how Lillian had responded to the alien menace by trying to use her daughter's genius. But there was something about a slightly older woman who was completely at home with herself that was, he had to admit, appealing...

So he made the mistake, the rookie testosterone mistake. He realized it the moment the black bag went over his head, and that, God help him, so sexy low voice said, "Maxwell Lord. What a surprise. I have taken great interest in your... attempts to foster greater caution in the general public about the aliens in our midst. Pink flyers might not have been your... most dignified marketing idea, but..."

Then there was a needle to his neck and a dizzy, sick feeling and the world went black.


	12. Doing the Right Thing in an Upended World

Vasquez sat, waiting. She hadn't started out life a patient person, but years of stakeouts waiting for rogue aliens had given her an appreciation for sitting in her own silence. The fact that this time, she was sitting in her Beetle across the street from Kara's apartment, watching both the street level door and the fourth story window didn't necessarily make the job harder. The fact that her passenger seat was stacked high with steaming boxes of pizza absolutely did.

A flash of red and blue. Vasquez gathered up the pizzas.

When Kara answered the door, she was wearing a pink sweater, a bad sign. She usually wore pink when she was trying to cheer herself up.

"Pizza!" said Kara gleefully. "I mean, Vasquez! What's the occasion?"

"Pizza to you too, kiddo. Alex said you guys were having a sisters night, so I told her I would drop off the food, because J'onn and I got back from DC early, and J'onn's got her working overtime again and she wanted to make sure you didn't eat alone."

"Nothing wrong with eating alone, I guess." Kara sat at her kitchen island with a carton of Chocolate Almond Macchiato ice cream in one hand and a spoon in the other. 

Vasquez said, "Okay, dinner! Kara, let me put the ice cream in the freezer."

"Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first," said Kara.

"And you have, Kara," said Vasquez, setting the four pizza boxes in front of the Girl of Steel. "But what if a call comes in and you are too hyped up on sugar to respond appropriately?"

Kara shrugged.

Vasquez said, "I got them to put pineapple and sausage on the Veggie Lovers..."

Kara's eyes widened. "Oh, Vasquez, you are the BEST." She immediately opened up the top box and started chowing down. "Arnyugnnahavsme?"

"Yeah, too many calories for me to keep my girlish figure." She took a slice of mushroom and pepper instead. "You, on the other hand, are looking a little thin. You know, kiddo, working around the clock is fine for a little while, but it isn't going to make the guilt go away."

Kara stared and stopped chewing. "What?"

"The guilt that you are personally to blame for all the destruction and death and loss."

"But, but..."

"I told you about my last mission as a Marine, didn't I? With the aliens in the desert? I was the only survivor. I knew those guys for three years, and I didn't, I couldn't... Survivor's guilt is a bitch, Kara, and you already carry enough of it because of Krypton. You can't take this on your shoulders too. Rhea is to blame, not you."

Kara set down the slice of pizza and wiped her fingers off on a dish towel. "Intellectually, I know that. I just... I can't... I don't know how to let it go."

"Well, talking about it is one way."

"Vasquez, no offense, and I know you are trying to step in and give me another big sister, and I appreciate it, I really do."

"It doesn't have to be me you talk to, kiddo. I was thinking of somebody else who might be blaming herself for some things."

"Alex? Why would she--"

"Not Alex. Lena."

"But why would Lena-- Except she would, wouldn't she. The Luthor thing."

"The Luthor thing. And the Her Mother is Kinda Evil thing. You really need to go talk to your girlfriend, Kara. She needs you."

Kara looked mortified. "How could I be so thoughtless? I'm a terrible girlfriend."

"I'd say you are new to relationships and these are terrible times we're living in. The point is to go make it right."

"I should go now! What am I going to say?"

"You'll figure it out."

In a small voice, Kara asked, "Vasquez, can I have a hug?"

Vasquez stepped forward and embraced Kara as tightly as she could.

Kara smiled, a tear sliding down her cheek. "You are a great hugger, Vasquez. Alex never told me! You make a really good extra big sister."

"Go fly, Supergirl!"

The wind from Kara c hanging and leaping out the window nearly pushed the pizza boxes off the table. And Vasquez's eyes absolutely weren't wet as she put the leftovers in Kara's refrigerator.


	13. Business Not As Usual

Marilyn's father had always said that Human Resources people were neither humane nor resourceful. Marilyn had made it her life's work to turn that stereotype around. LordTech people were known for being resourceful, not so much for being humane; as with most companies, leadership created the company's culture from above. Marilyn intended to lead from below. So when the new woman for the IT Department, Caroline Turing, came down to do her paperwork, Marilyn took it upon herself to make sure the woman knew how to report sexual harassment. 

The other things she was going to tell her got derailed by the news that Maxwell Lord had been kidnapped.


	14. Lena: It Didn't Have to Go This Way

Lena left work early. Well, early for her. Her driver, Ted, came and picked her up at 8 p.m. By the time she got home, she wanted nothing more than a hot bath and a few hours of mindless Netflixing, but she had only just thrown on shabby jeans and her MIT sweatshirt when the sound she had most wanted to hear for weeks hit her ears. She turned suddenly, a wild look of hope on her face that she quickly schooled into submission. There on the balcony, at last, was Supergirl.

Lena gestured for her to enter, even as Supergirl knocked gently on the glass.

Lena stood staring at the Girl of Steel, who looked more like a kicked puppy with a big red cape. "Supergirl," said Lena.

"Lena, don't."

"Why not? Formality seems appropriate for two people who don't know each other, haven't seen each other for weeks."

"I was working. We all were. I'm only just now back working with the DEO again."

"So you never came by because you were working."

"I was."

"So you didn't sleep?"

"I--"

"And there was absolutely no time for more than a text to a worried girlfriend?"

"I--"

"No, Kara. You don't get to just walk in here after completely ignoring me for three weeks straight. If you don't care enough about me even the check in so that I know you're okay, you don't care enough, period. And I have had a few bad relationships in my time, because I thought that's what I deserved, but I don't think that anymore."

"You deserve only good things, Lena. You deserve better than me. I couldn't even save my planet, I mean, my city. You had to save National City for me because I wasn't strong enough."

"And here I was thinking that was teamwork."

"No, Lena, that was all you, your genius, your foresight. All I did was push the button in the end. And I should have pushed it sooner than I did. If I had, the Daxamites wouldn't have done so much damage."

"Well, I can't really blame you," said Lena, dripping sarcasm. "You were trying to keep your boyfriend on your planet."

"No! Well, maybe. I don't know. Everything happened so fast, and every huge mistake I've made this past year was because I went off half-cocked, and I was trying not to do that again."

"And you see how well that went." Lena couldn't help herself. She knew she should forgive Kara and let it go, but the pain burned her, as it had been burning for weeks. "Kara, I think you should go now. You can leave the way you came in."

Without a word, Supergirl turned and made her way to the balcony, looked back once sadly, then leapt into the sky and disappeared. And Lena hated herself, she did, but she also noticed that not once had Kara thought to say, "I'm sorry."


	15. Cultivating Sources

When the news of Max Lord's kidnapping hit the news, Detective Maggie Sawyer had not anticipated the NCPD's Science Division to be called in. Most kidnappings of rich CEOs were human-conducted, statistically. But her captain had said that Lord's loud public opinion that aliens were dangerous made him a likely target for aliens who did not particularly care for that opinion. And he had sent Maggie to LordTech to get surveillance video footage and interview Lord's employees.

The VPs were no help at all. Lord's personal assistant positively stonewalled her. The new woman in IT looked vaguely familiar, but since she had only just started working the day before, she couldn't know anything. Maggie got the video and left, disgusted. It was almost like the man's company really didn't like him, didn't want him to be rescued. As she left the building at 5:30, when most of the employees were hurrying to the exits, a woman in a red pantsuit stopped her and said, "Detective?"

"Yes?"

"You're here about Mr. Lord, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am."

"Could we go somewhere and talk?"

"Of course, Ms....?"

"Call me Marilyn. There's a bar near here, if that's okay. I've had a very long day."

And as they walked to Dollywood together, Marilyn handed Maggie a pink flyer and told her the story of how they had begun to be seen on all the LordTech bulletin boards.


	16. Your Secret Weakness

Alex got home late. She didn't even bother to turn the lights on, simply went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth and padded toward her king-sized bed, happy to see the lumps under the covers that she knew were Vasquez. She stripped off her tactical gear and slipped under the covers, only to have Vasquez roll over and curl around her, the shorter woman playing big spoon. Alex grinned, and fell asleep with a smile on her face.

A few hours later, Alex woke because Vasquez had let her go and shuffled off to the bathroom. When she came back, Alex was wide awake. "Hey, you," she said. "Where'd you get that bladder? Woolworths?"

"Woolworths went out of business years ago," growled Vasquez.

"That would explain why the warrantee expired."

"You're sooo funny," Vasquez said. "But you don't realize that I know your secret."

"I have no secrets from you." Alex snuggled up against Vasquez.

"Nope. You don't. Because I am a top-notch secret agent intelligence operative person. And I got your sister drunk once at Dollywood. And she told me about your weakness!" 

"Perfectionism?"

"Nope."

"Good bourbon?"

"Nope."

"Shipping Shoot from Person of Interest long after it was cancelled?"

"Well, yeah, sure, but if that is your weakness, you're not alone in it. I'm right there with you, babe."

"Thanks. I can't think of anything else--"

And then Vasquez was tickling her: ribs, arms, legs, behind the ears....

"Stop, no, wait, stopstopstop!"

"Heh, heh, heh. Lucky for you the bad guys always use pain rather than tickling, or your street cred would be out the door, babe."

"Oh, gosh, oh, that, Rao."

"And now you're sounding like you're having an orgasm. Are you having an orgasm, Agent Danvers?"

"No, no, not yet, Agent Vasquez. Would you like to, um, change that state of affairs?"

"I really, really would."

And then she really, really did.


	17. Always Thinking Quickly

Max Lord woke up in a cell, groggy and cynical. At first he thought aliens might have abducted him to torture him or make him give them his technology. But then he heard... her voice. That deep voice, all the words articulated oh so clearly, the lazy pace of the sentences, like the woman had all the time in the world. The same voice that his audio tech people said was an 81% certainty of being the voice in those Cadmus videos: Lillian Luthor. And he knew a few things about Lillian Luthor.

She came and she talked at him. He didn't hear a word. He was dazzled by the pale blue eyes, the way she was looking down at him. He was five foot ten and she was taller than him and he suddenly found that he didn't mind. He would have thought that he would have minded, but he didn't. She was almost definitely ten years older than him, maybe more, but he found that he didn't mind.

She said, "So, what do you think? Want to help me end the alien menace once and for all?"

"Lillian. That's your name, isn't it? Beautiful name, like a flower. Don't you think it would make more sense for you to persuade me with good reasons rather than simply put some kind of biochemical love spell on me? Because, the way I understand motivation, a 'yes' obtained with clear consent is always better, more durable than a 'yes' obtained with dubious methods. So here's what I suggest. You give me time for whatever chemical your people drugged me with to clear, and you make your argument again, and I'll see whether, in a clear state of mind, I can agree with you. Because this? I know this isn't me. You and me? This is just wrong. But your ideas, the Cadmus project, I know it has some merit. And you know I know that or you wouldn't have had your people abduct me. But let me make up my own mind without this... weird love spell thing you're doing. Then we can both be clear that I'm deciding on my own, honestly."

She stared at him, like he was some kind of freak of nature, then turned on her heel and left.


	18. People Thinking That Other Way

M'gann had opened Dollywood fifty years ago, back when Kennedy was sending up astronauts to the moon. Back then it was Jetson's, and later Orbital. But the idea was always about accepting those who were different. The shift to the new location, the name Dollywood, was relatively recent, as was the openness to humans. For the most part, M'gann didn't regret those changes. Humans and aliens would only start accepting each other if they were able to spend time together, get to know each other better. What better to facilitate that than alcohol and billiards?

That had been the idea. It was still the idea. But since the 1980s when mass shootings had become more and more a staple of nightly news, since Orlando, since Medusa, M'gann had realized that a haven could also be a target.

So when she went out back to toss the trash from the early afternoon/lunch crowd and she saw the green-skinned man lying dead in front of the dumpster, she pulled out her phone. She had Detective Maggie Sawyer on speed dial. Of course she did. Wouldn't you?


	19. So Tiresome

Lillian Luthor waited several days to let Maxwell Lord's bizarre reaction to the alien sedative pass. When she returned to his cell, he was back to what she understood to be his normal self: snarky, sarcastic, and sexist. She let the tension in her shoulders ease. This would be so much easier to deal with than... whatever he had been under the influence of that drug. She made a mental note not to use it with human males again until they had worked out the side effects.

"So. Mister Lord. Are we feeling better?"

"If you mean am I no longer under your majorly creepy alien love potion? Yes. Yes. I am feeling much better."

"Excellent. Then perhaps you will be ready for a tour. You'll have to excuse the handcuffs. We do need to ensure that you won't suddenly run away.... with one of our patent ideas...."

"Of course! And anyway handcuffs--" He blanched. "I mean, yes, I understand. Patent protection. Intellectual property."

"Precisely. Follow me."

And she had to admit, his eyes went wide when he saw the three cyborgs that she let him see (not the army, which wasn't altogether ready yet, just Hank and some friends). He responded just as she'd hoped: awe, jealousy, greed. And something else, something that made her wary. Almost... respect?

"Well, Ms. Luthor--"

"Mrs."

"Yes, of course, Lionel. But didn't he die a few years back?"

"He did. But we were married for twenty years."

"Well, then. Mrs. Luthor. I have to admit that I am impressed by what you have achieved here. But what is the purpose?"

"I have seen your distressingly pink flyers, Mr. Lord. What do you think the purpose is? I want what you want. An Earth for humans, by humans, and humans alone."

"Then why did you have to abduct me? If you knew how closely aligned our interests were, why couldn't you simply come to me and ask for my help?"

"It's not like you would have simply signed up on the spot."

"Why do you think I wouldn--" He stopped, pinched the bridge of his nose. "No, of course not. I would do the right... I would... I..." He collapsed on the floor of the lab. Two very large cyborg guards picked him up by the armpits, and dragged him out.

And Lillian thought, That annoying man. Still in love with the alien and displacing it onto her. So tiresome.


	20. On to Plan B

Brian spent the Fourth of July at Dollywood selling energy drinks in the corner and raking in the cash. As an emerging alientrepreneur, he was a fan of capitalism and the American way. Using the Yankees/Heroes game on television as a cover for his activities, he had successfully made a month's rent before M'gann came over and gestured for his buyers to scatter. She sat across the table from him.

"Brian, you can't be selling that stuff in here. I'm not zoned for retail. You could get me in trouble with the NCPD and the zoning board."

"C'mon, M'gann, a guy has to make a living somehow."

"So does a gal, and you are not selling that caffeine juice in here."

"It's not just caffeine, it's also gingko and lemongrass and honest to goodness Chinese herbs!"

"Great, so a heart attack in a can. Doesn't matter. Out."

"How about out back? I don't mind the dumpster smell."

"You want to be selling your dubiously legal drink behind my bar?"

"Yes!

"Where just yesterday an alien was found dead?"

"Um..."

"Under suspicious circumstances?"

"Uh..."

"Now, I'm no doctor, but it looked like a heart attack to me."

"I'm going to just go now..."

"Good idea."

But, optimist that he was, as went out Brian thought. No problem. I just need to come up with a Plan B.


	21. Liaisons

Detective Maggie Sawyer was a detective. She detected. Unfortunately, she was also a liaison. She liaised. Normally, that was the part of her job she least enjoyed. Normally, she wasn't liaising with a super secret government organization with James Bond style sick tech and a director who understood the gritty realities of policing in the terrorist/extraterrestrial age.

And at this point, she could use another pair of eyes, another brain.

J'onn gestured to the chair in front of his desk and Maggie sat.

"Thank you for agreeing to work with me, Detective."

"The pleasure's all mine. You have a database that might help me close a case or two, dead aliens, but I've never seen this species. And I know you asked me here to talk about how we handle the anti-alien rhetoric, but this is starting to look like a serial killer." She pulled several folders out of her bag and handed them to him.

Methodically, he opened one after another, looked at the photos, looked at the Medical Examiner's reports. Finally, he looked up. "I would be interested in your theories, Detective."

"The deaths appear to be natural causes, but the individuals have nothing in common that we can tell except that they were all, well, green."

"I see that."

"There is a mix of human and non-human DNA in all of them. So, hybrids, if you'll excuse the term. We haven't found any of them quickly enough after death to be able to identify the alien DNA sources. Decay seems to break it down. But the causes of death--heart attack, aneurism, stroke--don't really match where the bodies were found. People who die of natural causes tend to die where they lived: at work, at school, at home, in their beds. In other people's beds. They don't die in abandoned buildings, dumpsters, construction sites in the middle of the night. That's why the ME has been ruling them suspicious."

"Somebody doesn't like the idea of miscegenation? Somebody who grew up with the idea of the scary green alien?"

"It's the most obvious theory. I thought if you had your species recognition software run these photos, we might get an idea of what species these are, in case the obvious theory isn't the right on."

"I'll put Winn right on it. Tell me, Detective, have you seen these flyers around?" From his desk drawer, he pulled out a pink sheet of paper with anti-alien screed, a call to arms to push aliens out of National City, off Earth, back to "where they came from."

She sighed. "They were all over the bulletin boards at LordTech."

"Any luck on finding Max?"

"We've been tracking the more militant pro-alien groups, but no luck there, not yet. And nobody has asked for ransom yet, which worries me."

J'onn handed her a list. "These are the humans who have been coming up on our searches, but we don't have enough evidence to investigate them ourselves."

Maggie handed him a list. "And here are the aliens that have come up for us, but we don't have jurisdiction. I'm guessing you have a little leeway there..."

"We certainly do." He stood and offered Maggie his hand. "Thank you for your help, Detective. As always, it's nice doing business with you."


	22. What We Find When We Look #1

Caroline Turing's resume was a mix of her real experiences and those of a very carefully curated set of other computer experts. But that didn't mean that she didn't know her way around very sophisticated computer technology. In fact, it only took her four hours to find what she was looking for, the bug on Max's personal devices that identified his actual planner, not the bogus one he put out there that the paparazzi and corporate spies could access. No. The real one. The one that predicted that he would be outside the National City Science Museum at 7 p.m. on the night he was abducted.

Coincidentally, she also found his OK Cupid profile and the woman who had lured him out. 

And, just, yuck.

But Caroline was used to disgusting things, corpses, bad code. In comparison, Maxwell Lord was nothing.


	23. What We Find When We Look #2

Winn Schott, Jr.'s resume was that of a master of his craft. He hacked into LordTech's server and it took him only forty-three minutes to find what he was looking for, the bug on Max's personal devices that identified his actual planner, not the bogus one he put out there that the paparazzi and corporate spies could access. No. The real one. The one that predicted that he would be outside the National City Science Museum at 7 p.m. on the night he was abducted.

Coincidentally, he also found his OK Cupid profile and the woman who had lured him out. 

And, just, yuck.

No. I mean, seriously, dude. Just. Yuck.


	24. When Teamwork Isn't That Easy

Three teams went out in response to Winn's discovery: one led by Alex, one led by Vasquez, and one led by Agent May. Vasquez took point, negotiating between Alex and May, earning her hard looks from both of them.

Alex's looks suggested that she thought Vasquez's history with May was more complicated than it sounded like. May's look suggested that May was unimpressed with Alex. Vasquez worked hard to keep their teams separate.

When they got to the Science Museum, of course they were twenty-four hours too late, but the DEO's crime scene analysts found blood, a syringe, and a cufflink.

May said, "A total waste of time."

Alex said, "The place where Max was abducted. A starting point. The cufflink and blood will show Max's DNA. A chemical analysis of the residue in the syringe will give us an idea of whether it was a human or alien that did the abducting. Data points, Agent May. One step at a time."

And because Vasquez was so proud of Alex for standing up to the Cavalry, she did what she always did when she was happy.

Or angry, or frustrated, or anything really.

She frowned.

Then she growled, "Back to base. Back to square one."


	25. The Mentor You Didn't Know You Needed

Cat Grant's personal elevator was about the only place at CatCo that doesn't smell like death and destruction, and no deodorizer was going to big enough or strong enough to take way that tang in the air from blood and the decay of dead bodies. But that wasn't keeping Cat's maintenance people from trying very hard. Meanwhile, Cat had to meet her HR people, sign all the condolence letters for the families of all the employees that they had lost in the battle, confirm the new hires to replace them, hire grief counselors for the old employees who had survived.

It was a lot of work, but it didn't keep Cat from noticing Kara Danvers, the sad look she wore these days like a habit, so different from her usual sunny demeanor. Even Snapper Carr had stopped treating Kara like shit, and that was saying something.

Cat had told Kara to interview Lena Luthor about the alien hospital, but she never got the article from her and if anything, Kara looked even more glum and hopeless. So Cat took it upon herself to do that particular interview. Maybe she could find out what was going on there.

When she arrived in the lobby of L-Corp, she saw that the building looked in better shape than CatCo, and it surprised her. Surely, after kidnapping the CEO, the Daxamites would have destroyed the woman's home base? The well-armed security people gave her a visitor's pass and let her up to Lena's top floor office.

Cat approached the secretary at the desk outside the office. "Ms. Huang, isn't it? Cat Grant, from CatCo Worldwide Media. I'm here to interview Ms. Luthor."

The woman looked surprised and seemed to glance behind Cat to see if anyone else was coming out of the elevator. "Er, yes, ma'am, let me see if she's free."

The woman disappeared and came back with Lena, who beckoned Cat inside and offered her the chair in front of her desk.

"Well, Cat, to what do I owe this pleasure?" She sat behind her desk, looking regal as always.

"I was hoping to discuss your new alien hospital, but I have to say, I am impressed by how little damage your building seems to have sustained."

"Appearances are deceiving. But when Lex was in charge, the company suffered major damage practically every week, so my maintenance people tend to make the Army Corps of Engineers look like Cub Scouts."

"I'm especially impressed by the lack of smell. My people tell me death gets into the carpet fibers. I'm having to replace almost all the carpets at CatCo."

"Actually, I can help you with that, for a price, of course. I developed some tech that uses supersonics to remove scents from fibers. I'll have Jess send you a brochure."

"Excellent. Now, can you tell me about the hospital you're building?"

"It's just a clinic, really, general medicine, pediatric and an emergency room/surgery unit. I've been recruiting doctors and nurses and medical lab techs and finding out more than I want to know about the laws about privacy of medical records and computer programs for storing medical records safely, because that is going to be a huge issue. And apparently there are some important vaccinations that certain species will need if they're going to be interacting with birds or cats. Go figure."

Cat took notes. "And you've named it after your father, I understand. Surely that's a risky decision, linking the Luthor name to an alien clinic?"

"My father was not anti-alien. He was a cautious man and believed that alloys were the strongest metals, if you will, that innovation came from diversity: two characteristics that neither my mother nor my brother share. But yes, I am choosing to link the Luthor name to this so that my father's name has a legacy connected to something good, something compassionate, something that makes the world a better place, as I believe this will do. Aliens can only add to the good in the world if they're healthy, after all."

"Are any of the medical staff actually aliens?"

"Most will be, yes. And National City General Hospital will have humans and aliens interning at the clinic to bring back knowledge and skills for when ambulances, for example, bring a human-looking alien to NCGH and they need to help. We hope to get a similar program going with St. Olaf's as well, and also with Metropolis General."

"Do you have plans for growing it into something more than just a clinic?"

"We are just digging the foundation, right now, Cat, so it's early days for thinking about that. That will depend almost entirely on whether the aliens of the city trust it enough, find it useful enough. It will be up to them, then, to say what's needed. I mean, human hospitals have cancer wards and mental health wards. Who knows what kind of departments might turn out to be needed by the wide variety of species in our city."

"Aren't you afraid that people will think you are doing this so you can experiment on aliens?"

"They won't think that if no one suggests they should think that, Cat. I'm putting up a portion of the money, raising more through charitable events, and I will be on the Board of Directors. Actually, Cat, we still need a few more directors. You might want to consider it. Max Lord volunteered, but of course I turned him down."

"Wise choice. I'll give it some thought. Another person you might want to consider is Supergirl."

Lena flushed and looked back out the window, as if looking for a flash of red and blue. "Somehow I imagine the Girl of Steel doesn't have time for such trivial things."

"Time?" asked Cat lightly. "Or heart? If she's got as much PTSD as my employees do, it's a miracle she can still even fly. Not everyone is as resilient as you or me, Lena, not even superheroes. If anything, I should imagine it's worse for them. Have you ever heard of compassion fatigue? Doctors and first responders get it, from seeing too much of the bad things and not always being able to fix them."

Lena gave her a long look. "Be that as it may. Someone who already has such extreme responsibilities can't be expected to pick up another drain on her time. Because if she said yes and then failed to do her part, it would be all the more... disappointing... to the Board. People shouldn't take on... responsibilities they can't handle."

Cat closed her notebook and sighed. "She's still learning what she can handle. And, let's face it, intergalactic warfare was not something anyone taught us how to handle when we were in school. Don't get me wrong, Ms. Luthor, the Board absolutely would be well within its rights to expect a certain level of dependability from one of its members. On the other hand, most of its members will probably never be asked to go one on one with a queen of a dead planet, myself notwithstanding. It seems to me that this... situation would be a balance between... the Board's boundaries and any individual member's specific circumstances, don't you agree?"

"As always, Cat Grant gives us pause for thought," said Lena. "Will that be all?"

"For now," said Cat. "But keep in touch, Lena. We female CEOs really need to stick together in these trying times."

Lena Luthor saw her out, looking thoughtful. Thoughtful and tired.


	26. How the World Has Changed

Back when Maggie was in the police academy back in Gotham, she took the classes on riot training. They all did. Gotham was a hellhole with more supervillains and villain-wanna-bes per square mile than any other city in America. So you figured that maybe once or twice a year there would be a horde of crazies running through town looting and burning, or at least chanting hate slogans. Especially back then, right before Commissioner Gordon started cleaning up the place, with the help of Batman and Batwoman et al. But once she'd left Gotham and started working in National City, Maggie had just assumed those bad old days were firmly behind her.

Then she'd joined the Science Division.

Up until then, she had watched the low level rancor that humans felt about aliens, had seen the graffiti, had cleaned up after the random stabbing behind a bar when politics got a little too... intergalactic. But it hadn't been like this.

And then Lillian Luthor and her Cadmus goons and her Cadmus propaganda had started getting phrases like "alien menace" and "Earth for humans" on everybody's lips. Well, not on the lips of anybody Maggie worked with--they'd have gotten fired on the spot for that shit. But her neighbors. The same people she'd heard say things like, "I don't care if you're gay, just don't act gay around me" or "it's the sin, not the sinner."

And she was used to that shit, sure, like she was used to getting told to go back to Mexico, but it never turned into the things that had happened in the past year: the alien fight club, the story about how aliens bought human slaves on that moon, the mass murder of aliens at the bar, her bar, her safe place. People she knew. People she drank with. People she played pool with. All dead.

But that was Cadmus. That wasn't National City. Not then.

And then came Rhea, the queen of a dead planet, looking for a planet for her people to settle, to colonize, to take for themselves. Looking for a planet with people she could take as slaves. Proposing, in fact, the one thing all the alien-haters most feared.

It was one thing to tell people not to hate all aliens because the vast majority of aliens didn't want to take over Earth, they just wanted a decent job and food and shelter and to raise their families in peace, just like everybody else, just like humans. It was another thing to try to tell people not to hate all aliens when suddenly there were hundreds of thousands of aliens ravaging the city, slaughtering humans, declaring that they were going to, well, take over Earth.

Yeah, that made her job harder.

And sure, through fighting and killing and technology and heroic measures, the humans had beaten them off. But war changes people. War means fear and pain, which lead to more fear and a desire to spread the pain around. And now, even though the Battle of National City was over, done with , won... the city had fundamentally changed.

And that was how Detective Maggie Sawyer found herself donning riot gear, complete with helmet, shield and baton, along with a hundred other NCPD officers. Because the Ku Klux Klan and Cadmus were holding a joint rally, and it was a no brainer to expect that they would be armed. And when the KKK was armed, that only meant bullets and bile. But Cadmus, as much as they claimed to hate aliens, loved alien tech, alien weapons, freaking plasma rifles. And Maggie remembered the Cadmus dupe from several months before who had attacked the protest outside L-Corp. The riot shields had not held up against a plasma rifle.

The Channel Seven news was predicting a thousand people at the demonstration and maybe two hundred counter-protesters. A hundred cops was not going to be able to control that if anything went wrong. They had lost so many of their own during the battle. Maggie remembered watching Cutter fall at the entrance to the precinct. She had stepped over his body, picked up his shotgun and fired without even hesitating.

Stepped over his fucking body. She did not want to have to do that again today, and she feared she might have to.

Of course, that was because she had forgotten about Alex Danvers.

By the time they reached Jefferson Park, it already had a cordon around the perimeter, made up of heavily armed troops in black combat gear marked FBI (which she knew meant DEO) and SHIELD (and she didn't really know what that meant). She led the way to the command post, where Alex, Vasquez and an older Asian American woman who wasn't even armed stood talking.

Alex saw her, recognized her even behind her helmet's face shield. "Sawyer, thanks for coming to the party. We were hoping NCPD could create a friendly zone around the counter-protesters. Our teams will take the unfriendlies, since we have more firepower than you guys are allowed to use in the city."

And Maggie appreciated the way Alex hadn't made the cops feel like they were less than the larger organizations (which the real fibbies never managed themselves, the bastards).

And so she mock-saluted Alex and arranged her people as instructed and thanked her lucky stars that this wasn't Gotham.


	27. Not the Fight I'm Used To

Back when they had been prepping in the DEO's armory, Vasquez had offered her a gun, but Agent Melinda May had said, "If I need a gun, I'll take one," and she had seen out of the corner of her eye Agent Danvers roll her eyes but say nothing.

But May didn't like relying on a weapon that had a limited number of shots. Her body was unlimited, and she never had to reload. Similarly, she took a bulletproof vest but said no to the rest of the riot gear. The helmet messed with her side vision and the shields were bulky and got in the way (and yes, she was aware of the irony). She might not have minded the kind of virtual shield that Phil Coulson's robotic arm could project at the push of a button, but she wanted to be as unhindered as possible.

When they got to Jefferson Park and set up a command post, Agent Danvers ordered her troops into position around the park, with orders not to fire unless ordered to, batons only, etc., etc.

May stretched first one finger and then the next, feeling the arthritis in some of the knuckles and trying to work the kinks out before she threw her fifty-year-old body into yet another fight. Because they all know these groups would start with the talking but it wouldn't end with just the talking.

It didn't.

After the first three people spoke--all of them victims of the Daxamite invasion--a woman came to the podium--tall, blonde, impressive--and spoke with great passion about the next invasion and needing to be ready. And then she slipped back into the crowd, and May followed her instinctively, even as white-hooded men started getting up and speaking about all kinds of aliens, those from this world and those from other worlds and how America needed to stay American which meant staying white, and throwing out everybody else, everybody who was black, brown, yellow, green, blue and purple.

The woman moved through the crowd and May struggled to follow, but suddenly she disappeared like a ghost. At the same moment, a ripple went through the crowd and a cry went up, "Earth for humans! Take it back!"

And from the counter-protesters, "Earth for everyone! Equality for all!"

And then fists started flying. And then people May had thought were humans started flying. Cadmus people leaping into the air and landing with horrific punches in the middle of the alien protesters. Red blood, green blood.

She punched and kicked one of the speakers and realized that the person had a prosthetic leg that kicked like a rhinocerous. She went flying into a pair of white-hooded men and fought off their attacks, threw one over her shoulder to the ground. He pushed himself up but she kicked him in the throat.

Then blue flashes went off and red laser pulses and May had fought off humans and Inhumans with her hands and feet, but this? This was something completely different. She dodged and weaved simply to keep herself from being burned, threw herself over another man's back to land in front of Agent Danvers, who pulled out a Glock with her left hand, smacked it into May's hand, yelled, "Backup piece!" and shot a laser over May's shoulder.

After that May shot her way back to the command post, where the troop van had extra guns and ammo, but by the time she had rearmed, Supergirl was taking out the plasma guns from above with her laser eyes. It was all but over.

When they got back to the DEO armory, May handed Agent Danvers the empty Glock. "Thanks."

"Any time."

"After all the debrief...," said May. "Buy you a drink?"

Danvers nodded. "Sure. I know a place."

May nodded and headed down to Medical to get some cuts she hadn't even felt cleaned up. Then she debriefed with Agent Piper-- But no, that had been an alias. Her name was actually Vasquez. Whatever. The girl was good at her job. And when she finished her job, saying May was the last, she said, "I have a feeling Agent Danvers will want to buy you a drink. Let me give you a ride to our bar."

And that was how the Cavalry ended up riding to Dollywood in a Beetle. It wasn't her usual look. But when she got to the bar and found that half of the clientele were blue or green, and that the clothes of the other half were largely black combat gear?

Agent May felt right at home.


	28. Non, Je Ne Regret Rien

Alex got to the bar first, Vasquez already having texted her. She kicked Brian out of their usual booth, saying that no, she wasn't interested in energy drinks or vitamins either. Tonight she would have at least two glasses of good scotch and five glasses of water and if M'gann had those really greasy mozzarella sticks, she would probably eat as many as Kara. 

Well, okay. Almost as many.

By the time May and Vasquez showed up, Alex had finished her first scotch and was starting to think the world might just finally slow down for five minutes, long enough for her to relax before the next battle.

But for a moment it looked like the next battle was about to begin. Half a dozen DEO and SHIELD agents at a nearby booth had started drinking a lot earlier than Alex had and when they saw May and Vasquez enter the bar together, one of the DEO agents yelled, "Oh my fucking God! The fucking CAVALRY is drinking at Dollywood!"

And the SHIELD agents looked absolutely terrified and tried to shut him up. May and Vasquez had gone utterly still two steps past the entrance. Vasquez looked scared. May had no expression at all on her face, but then Alex had only seen her look anything except bored during that moment when she clearly had suddenly realized that she needed to take a gun from assailants who didn't use guns. Mostly she looked, well, not bored exactly, but maybe angry and hiding it? Alex knew that look. A lot of agents wore that look.

The SHIELD agents yelled frantic apologies to May, who simply frowned and turned to see Alex wave. She sauntered over, followed by Vasquez who looked stunned.

Alex waved to M'gann, who came over with three neat scotches. "This round's on me," said May with an even voice.

May and Vasquez took seats opposite Alex, which surprised Alex, since Vasquez almost always sat next to her at the bar, but then she realized that Vasquez was trying to convey something to her without May seeing it, so she simply raised her glass. "To surviving. And may we always make a habit of it."

A ghost of a smile crossed May's lips. Vasquez looked less panicked. Alex said, "It's been good having your people with us these last few weeks, Agent May."

"It's just May, Agent Danvers."

"Alex, please."

"I imagine you're especially happy not to have funeral duty."

Alex closed her eyes briefly and shook her head. "You're not wrong about that. I was surprised when J'onn announced that, but it made sense. These people hurt our families, our city, our friends, us. Killed. It might be hard to be as respectful as you want to be with the corpses when you remember things like that."

May nodded. Vasquez looked away, looked pained. Alex said, "Babe, what is it?"

"Iraq. I saw some things. Not important."

But both women turned their attention to her. Alex said, "So you advised J'onn...?"

"Risk assessment is my job, Alex," Vasquez half-snarled.

Alex felt her jaw drop in shock. "I, I'm sorry?"

"No, no, hon, it's me. This month has just brought back a lot of shit I thought I had finished working through, that's all. I apologize for snapping."

Quietly, May asked, "What did you see?"

Vasquez looked angry. Alex knew that Vasquez pretty much always looked a little annoyed. It was her resting bitch face, and Alex thought it was cute. Now her face was different, paler, harder, as if inside she was fighting a hard battle.

Finally, she took a swallow of scotch and said, "You always heard things, things soldiers did after a battle... horrible things. But I never saw it myself. And then those aliens attacked my convoy, and I was the only one in my unit to survive, but after they shot the aliens, the unit that rescued me, they chopped up the aliens with their K-bar knives. Their uniforms were covered in green gore. I was hopped up on painkillers, waiting for the medevac, so it's all a little surreal in my memory, almost kaleidoscopic. But just as horrific."

Alex did not think that May was a particularly touchy person, but she laid a hand on Vasquez's shoulder. "We've all seen more than our fair share." She squeezed gently and let go.

And they changed the topic and talked girltalk instead:

Alex described her new gun from space, practically glossing over the part where she was actually on another planet, because duh. 

May described SHIELD's Icers and how they started out as the Night-Night Gun, and how thank God that Jemma Simmons (they'd like her) finally convinced Leo Fitz to change the name. "Your Agent Schott reminds me of Fitz...."

Vasquez described how Alex had agreed to "meet Supergirl outside" and then had run shooting to the balcony, twirled around, still shooting and jumped off--

May stared, "What? How many stories is that?"

Alex shrugged. "Pfft. She always catches me."

And then Brian, of course it had to be Brian, the DEO fanboy, ambled up to their table like a drunken sailor and offered Agent May a Dollywood napkin. Loudly and drunkenly, he said, "Um, Agent May, could I have your autograph? I have a friend who's an Inhuman and you helped him last year and he's told me all about your being the Cavalry and--"

Vasquez was half out of her seat, but she was on the inside, so she couldn't pull him away. The bar hushed on the C-word. Alex frowned, confused.

In a quiet, threatening voice, Vasquez said, "Don't call her the Cavalry. She... doesn't like it."

M'gann hurried over, "Please, the last thing we need is--"

But May said, "Gimme that."

She took the napkin and the pen he offered and wrote, M. May, the Cavalry and dated it. "You're welcome."

"Thank you, thank you. Ima put his up on my frame, in a wall!"

M'gann led him away. The bar remained hushed. May looked up, raised her glass. "To the Cavalry. May we always get there on time when we're really needed."

She tossed off the rest of her scotch and the rest of the bar drank deeply and looked away, startled, some knowing the enormity of what had just happened, and some not having a clue. Vasquez hadn't moved a muscle, eyes wide. Alex drank the toast.

Vasquez said, "Ma'am? I mean, May?"

May sighed. "Piper, I mean, Vasquez--"

"Piper's fine. It's my middle name."

Alex frowned in surprise but kept her mouth shut.

"Piper, I assume you know the story."

"I know all the stories, including the one with the horse, but I'm pretty sure the simplest one is the true one."

"It is. What I had to do that day in Bahrain, killing that Inhuman girl, that haunted me for years. Years. I hated that people focused on my saving the day when they should have focused on the price she paid to be stopped. I always wished I had found another way. It was my biggest regret."

It was Vasquez's turn to sigh. "People don't like to think about costs."

"The thing is, a few months before your battle here, I ended up in a simulation, a virtual reality, in which the starting factor was me deciding not to kill her. That was the only change they made. And it turned the world inside out, put Hydra in power in the US and parts of the rest of the world. Hydra, if you've never heard of it, was started by the Nazis. The world was a perfect dystopia. All because I hadn't made the right call that day in Bahrain. All because I refused to make the kill. And the entire world suffered for it."

Alex turned to see Kara come into the bar with Lena and Winn. She looked back at Vasquez and May. She said slowly, "I guess everybody has regrets. And in our line of work, they tend to be painted with blood and fire and ash. But Supergirl has a friend from a different universe's Earth, and he's changed the timeline a few times now, mostly by accident. It never ends well. I'm just saying, maybe we can feel the regret, but we shouldn't let it run us."

They nodded. May said, "You're wise for your age, Alex."

Vasquez said, "Some people are older on the inside than they are on the outside."

And Alex turned to see her sister, whose world was destroyed, Winn, whose father was a mass murderer, and Lena, whose mother and brother had tried to commit genocide several times each. The three were smiling at each other, looking very young. "You know, Vasquez," said Alex. "I think you're right."


	29. Small Miracles

From the moment the melee in Jefferson Park ended, well, a few minutes after that, really, more like a few minutes after Supergirl had finished the live interview with Channel Seven News, Kara's cell phone hand been ringing off the hook in her boot. But she could see Alex and Vasquez from where she was standing and neither one was on her phone, so she ignored it at first, hurrying to the command post to ask if anyone needed her help. But they just waved her away and Vasquez had said, "Answer your phone! I can't concentrate with all that ringing."

It was Lena.

"Oh, Kara, are you okay? I saw the footage of the fight! Is Alex okay? And Vasquez and Winn? And Maggie?"

Supergirl could not stand in a public place gaping at her phone and weeping, so she didn't. She flew, phone still at her ear as the questions went on, about J'onn and James and the rest. She landed on the L-Corp balcony, to see Lena turn the moment she landed. They both dropped their phones and hurried into each other's embrace.

Lena hugged her hard, harder than most humans who weren't Alex ever managed to do. "Lena, are you okay? Did anybody try to hurt you?"

"No! No, no, of course not, all the action was where you were, I just saw it on TV and Jess said there were a few casualties, but they weren't giving out names, and I just worried about all your friends--"

"All our friends, Lena." Supergirl pulled her in and held her while she sobbed. This was so unlike Lena that she didn't know what to do. She whispered, "They're all fine. It's okay. They're fine."

Finally, Lena seemed to return to her usual self, pulled away, wiped away tears carefully with a folded tissue so as not to muss her mascara. "Well, then. Excellent. I, I'm very glad to hear it. I didn't mean to interrupt your work. I shouldn't have even. Thank you very much for--"

"Lena... Talk to me? I know I messed up. I avoided you because I was afraid I'd let myself all apart when the city needed me most. When I'm with you, I don't have to hold myself together and.... I'm sorry. I was stupid and selfish and weak. I didn't know how to show you that side of me. I thought you'd hate me, well, I mean, I guess you kind of do, because--"

Lena shook her head and turned, went to the drinks table, poured herself a glass of scotch. "I don't hate you, Kara. But this is the first time you've said that you were sorry." She turned back to look at her, sighed and gestured to the white couch. "Sit with me?"

Supergirl strode over, pushed her cape aside and sat down on her end of the couch, the end closer to the door. Lena sat on her end. The space between them seemed endless. They sat, simply looking at each other. Supergirl said, "Um, you look a little tired. Have you been overworking?"

"I'm a Luthor. Of course I'm overworking. Except these days it seems like all of National City is doing the same thing, so I guess I'm not all that special anymore."

"You're always special, Lena."

"Did you see my mother? Hear her speech?" Lena's voice lost its cool control. There was a raggedness there that Kara recognized.

"Yes."

"She's been poisoning this city all year."

"Yes."

"And you and the DEO keep trying to administer the cure. Battle after battle."

"I do, and you do, and now the DEO has more backup than just the overworked NCPD."

"Oh, yes, SHIELD. I've heard of them. Lex always thought they were a joke."

"I think they've been getting more funding over the last four or five years. Some of their tech is, I think the word Winn used was 'sick.'"

"Well, if Winn respects it, I imagine that Lex would."

At first Kara wasn't sure whether or not Lena was being sarcastic. "I know Alex was excited about some of the weapons..."

Lena took another sip of the scotch. "And where are the Superfriends this evening? Off sharpening their bullets?"

"Hardly. They're probably at Dollywood, dulling the pain, I'd imagine."

Lena emptied her glass. "Is that where you're going?"

"I had thought I'd go home, actually. Netflix and chill."

Lena almost smiled. "I suspect you mean ice cream, Kara."

"What? Of course. I found out that Starbucks makes a coffee ice cream that has way more coffee in it than most..."

"Honestly, Kara, you look like what you really need is Aldabaran rum."

"I don't need the hangover. I'm already pretty spent from the fight."

"So drink it slowly."

"Will you come with me? To Dollywood?"

"A date?"

"Um, if, if you want."

"No."

Supergirl tried to adjust glasses that weren't there.

Lena relented. "If you call Winn, then we can go together, the three of us... as friends. Not a date, just a way to unwind from all the violence."

'"Okay, I'll call him and then fly us--"

"No flying. I'll call my driver. Have Winn meet us here. We'll go over together."

And Supergirl went to Lena's executive bathroom and changed back into her Kara clothes, sad but sort of hopeful. She thought Lena was smart to include Winn as their middleman, their wingman. Maybe if he were there with them, they wouldn't antagonize each other, might even have a good time. For the first time in weeks, maybe months, she began to feel a little bit of hope.


	30. I Will Always Be What You Need

Winn got Kara's text message with all the worried emojis and couldn't figure out why Kara wanted to him to hang out with her and Lena or why she was so worried about it. And he tried calling Alex, but her phone was busy so he called Vasquez instead.

"Yo, Winn. What?"

"Is there something not good going on between Kara and Lena? Because I know they haven't seen each other much lately, but Kara sounds really worried about the prospect of hanging out with her at Dollywood tonight and wants me to third wheel."

"That's not third-wheeling, Little Plaid Shirt. It's middle-manning or wing-manning or, hell, I don't know. Helping out."

"I can do that. For Kara. Yeah, of course."

"I know you can, buddy. They'll thank you later. Hell, the city will thank you later. You do realize that, regardless of what you, me and Alex do, it always pretty much comes down to those two chicks saving the city, and the world, again?"

"Gosh, I think you're right."

"And they do it better when they're getting along well. You're job here is clear, Agent Schott. You have your mission."

"Does that mean I have to stay sober?"

"Relatively. Yes, because if Kara has any of that alien rum, it's going to take all of us to keep her from flying."

"Oh, good point..."

//

It would have been easier to meet them at the bar but Kara begged him to meet them at L-Corp. Sharing the towncar with them felt a little like his senior prom, the limo, his nerd friends and him going together because none of them actually had dates, even though they were two girls and two guys, so that's how they had done the pictures, so that they looked like all the other couples. That was sort of how he felt now, except for the "this limo is really a tricycle" thing. Never mind. He trusted Vasquez. If she said he was saving the world in advance, he probably was. Threat assessment was what she thought about 24/7. He suspected she even thought about it while brushing her teeth, and let's face it, almost nobody thought about anything while they were brushing their teeth.

By the time they got to the bar, the place was packed with aliens and agents, and Winn didn't think they were going to get a table until he saw Brian waving a napkin and yelling drunkenly about General Custer's last stand and the charge of the Light Brigade, none of which made any sense, but it meant that, when Brian's friends decided to take him home, Winn and company got the table very smoothly. Both Kara and Lena complimented him warmly on that and he had to remind himself that they were both lesbians, or more accurately, Lena was a lesbian and Kara was a bisexual dating her. And then they ordered their drinks: Aldabaran rum, club soda, Cosmo. And then the conversation ground to a halt.

Kara excused herself to go to the ladies room, giving him a panicked look as she went. 

Winn was an agent on a mission. He dove in. "So Lena, build any black body field generators lately?"

She laughed. "I haven't, although I remember you said that we should work on miniaturizing the one we used at my gala, making it more portable..."

"Yeah, I was thinking about that this afternoon at the... rally. The problem is that we were facing more of those weapons, and I'm not sure that a miniaturized version could put out as much power. So whereas we only had to deal with what, three or four weapons before, with the big generator? There had to be dozens of weapons of different sizes today. A smaller generator might not be able to produce as much of a signal..."

That conversation lasted at least forty minutes and ended with at least eight Dollywood napkins scribbled on. Winn stuffed them into the pocket of his plaid shirt, loosened his necktie. There was a long pause. Lena and Kara avoided each other's eyes. Winn flicked his eyes over to where Maggie Sawyer was joining Alex, May and Vasquez. Vasquez raised one eyebrow. Winn smiled and turned back to his... not dates.

"So, Kara, how's Snapper? I've been thinking about that whole Cadmus-kidnapping-you-guys thing with the whole super-awkward pink kryptonite thing. Didn't Snapper get a couple of concussions? How's he doing with that?"

"You know, I've been worrying about him. I saw that documentary about concussions, I watched it with Alex, and about how football players who have a certain number of concussions eventually end up with long-term problems."

Lena frowned. "Does Snapper show any signs of problems like that?"

"He rubs his eyes a lot and then he looks like he's having trouble focusing."

"You know, that might be a bad sign. I actually ran into some very good human doctors, during all the research I've been doing into alien medical personnel, including one neurocognitive scientist doing research on concussions. Here, let me give you his number. I know you don't like Snapper much, but he was very brave when we were being held by my mother. I don't care for him, but I can't help but respect him..."

Another Dollywood napkin, this one stuffed into Kara's plaid shirt pocket. "Thank you, Lena! You're the best! You even like people you don't like!"

Winn said, "Kara, you might want to slow down on that rum..." He signaled M'gann and she brought over some Oriental raisin tree tea. Winn explained, "There's a compound in it that should slow down the effects of the rum."

Lena looked quizzical. "That works for Earth alcohol, to a limited extent. I hadn't heard that it worked for alien alcohol equivalents."

"I've only read two papers on it, but after getting very drunk with Mon-El that one time, and seeing Kara drunk that other one time, I found it useful to set a ping on research into human/alien chemistry overlaps like this."

Lena grabbed a napkin and jotted down some notes. She paused and realized that she didn't actually have any pockets, blushed and stuffed the napkin into her purse.

Kara laughed. "The tea tastes funny. Not bad, just funny. Lena, you need clotheses that has pocketses, you know, like Gollum would say. I find that plaidses clotheses has pocketses. Also, men's shirts oftens has pocketseses. And sometimes are plaids."

Lena said, "Kara, you might want to spend more time drinking your tea and hold off on more rum for a while." 

Kara's glass, as they would say, was either half full or half empty. Winn thought at this point it was probably half full. He turned to see M'gann bringing them a serving of mozzarella sticks and a stack of napkins. "From Alex," she said.

Lena and Winn both took a single stick and pushed the basket toward a very happy looking Kara. They handed Kara one napkin and split the rest of the stack of napkins between them.

After her third Cosmo, Lena said to Winn, "I don't know how much you've been paying attention to the materials science going on at MIT these days?"

"I am insulted," said Winn, "that you have to ask. Of course I pay attention. I am all about the materials."

"Well they've been building materials that can channel WiFi, building hats out of it so you can get your music and news through yer fecking baseball hat, if you can imagine it."

And Winn thought he knew what fecking might possibly mean, though he wasn't sure, since Lena Luthor? Swearing? But the idea of a WiFi hat had the other 98% of his attention. "That is so cool!"

"I know, right? But I was thinking, what if we could build, like, mood fabric? Kind of like the mood rings from the 1970s? Except based on more than simply body temperature. If we could thread different fibers, nanofibers, into the fabric. Each of them could either sense or respond to the different kinds of feedback that, for example, a lie detector um, you know, detects. Skin temperature. Heart rate. Skin acidity. Sweat. All those things."

"But the tunability--"

"That's a second level problem. Are you in? Do you want to work on this with me? Because, like you said, you are the materials guy..."

"I absolutely am."

Kara drained her large pot of tea, grinning widely. "I feel floaty."

Lena rubbed her eyes. "Please don't start floating around the bar, darling. You know how that would go. Your sister would tie your belts together so she could control your yaw and speed and, well, then your friend Pam from HR would get involved, and you know how she so hates making people sign the NDAs."

Kara pointed at Lena. "You. Are. Right. IsntsherightWinn? Shesright. I shouldn't let myself float."

Lena looked at Winn. "I just can't. Can you? Get her home? Safely? Please?"

"Easy-peasy, quick and easy!" Winn said, and saw the same look Lena had given Kara when she'd said "Golly" at the gala. He sighed. "Yes, yes, I can. Don't worry."

Because Agent "Little Plaid Shirt" Schott was on a mission to take care of a woman he loved, even if she was in love with somebody else, and he would take care of her with every gentlemanly bone in his body, because she was Kara Danvers and deserved the best of everything.


	31. Acting Like It

J'onn J'onzz was over three hundred years old. He understood why people ingested mood-altering substances, even when it gave them hangovers. He could chart Earth history by his worst hangovers: the French Revolution, the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, the music of the 1980s.

So, yes, he got it, he did: why, after the Battle of National City, his agents (and the rest of the city) had gotten completely plastered; why, after yesterday's melee in Jefferson Park, his agents (and the rest of the city) had somewhat... tied one on.

That didn't mean he had to like the psychic aftermath the morning after. And all day long. By the end of the day, he had had it. He was emotionally exhausted from the battery that was his agents' physical and emotional pain of everyone's hangovers, both from the battle and from the drinking.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, J'onn ignored the powerful emotions of the agents around him, some of whom had made questionable choices the night before, some of whom were deeply traumatized and some of whom were blissfully happy. And of course, some of whom were all of the above.

They had roll call, which he hadn't done since taking over the DEO, and yes, he even made a short speech.

"All right. Listen up. The Department of Extra-Normal Operations has been dealing with alien and other extra-normal phenomena since its founding. So the rally that happened yesterday, and the melee afterwards? That kind of extra-normal operation has become our new normal. You know this. And so, and I hate to say it, but this is my job, to say these things. And so, from now on, any agent who is not completely fit to do his, her or their duty on the day after a melee or battle? Is fired. No appeal. I understand, I do, that after something like what happened yesterday, and especially after what happened a month ago, we... we all look for comfort. But our enemies also know this about us, and if they seek our destruction, they will use this knowledge against us. The stakes are high, people. The fate of the world rests on our shoulders. On your shoulders. It's time we all started acting like it. Dismissed."

Alex Danvers never moved an inch as the other agents mulled around her and left. Agent Vasquez never batted an eye. Agent Schott looked like he might have shitted himself. J'onn looked away, only to see those SHIELD agents, Coulson and May, looking at him quizzically.

He crossed his arms over his chest and waited as they came to him.

Alex said, "Sir, that policy seems a little..."

"Draconion?" offered Coulson.

Vasquez suggested, "If you think they will do that do us, why don't we do that to them? Attack them on the day after?"

Winn said nothing, simply looked terrified.

May stared at J'onn. The two of them were very similar, J'onn suspected, people who had trauma that they buried, mined, to use later. J'onn said quietly, "Policies change the behavior of roughly 80% of any given population. The 10% who are most conservative already go above and beyond. The other 10%--" and here he glared at Alex and Kara "won't necessarily change what they do, but they might consider changing how publically they do it."

Coulson grinned. "I think I have a lot to learn from you, Director."

"Likewise." He looked at Supergirl, who was leaning heavily on Alex. "Supergirl, what's your status?"

"Sir?" She looked confused.

"Your health, your powers."

"Um, I think I'll need to stay overnight with the sunlamps, then I'll probably be just fine."

J'onn looked over at Alex who make a tiny see-sawing motion with her hand.

"Fair enough. I want Dr. Hamilton to give you a look tomorrow morning, just to make sure you're ready for work."

Kara groaned but left with Alex and Vasquez.

Coulson and May shared a look.

Coulson said, "Director J'onzz? Our agents are in the barracks here, which we understand have a rigorous non-alcohol policy..."

J'onn stared at him at first, and then started laughing. "Director Coulson, I think it is fair to say that my speech was focused on results rather than causes. They can drink if they want, but responsibility is key. The point is that they are ready to fight off the enemy whether it comes at three a.m. or six a.m. or noon."

"Excellent. We understand each other. I really like this place. Not 1940s brick nostalgia, like our headquarters. More state-of-the-art. Very classy."

Agent May rolled her eyes a bit, but her look as she followed him to the barracks was affectionate. J'onn filed that one, as Vasquez might have said, under "I" for Interesting.


	32. Making the Unimportant-Seeming Choices

Phil Coulson woke in an unfamiliar place, and this was exactly the sort of situation where he most missed his missing hand. Yes, the smart prosthetic was cool and had all kinds of doodads that his real hand never had, but it wasn't the same, it was never going to be the same. And since, when he wasn't in the field, he didn't sleep with the prosthetic on his arm, he always woke weak, with a key piece missing, broken.

So he rolled off the Army-style cot onto the floor, still disoriented. The prosthetic was always close by, along with the talcum powder that he had to put on the stump before he screwed it on. And there he was in shorts and t-shirt, with his hand smelling like a baby's bum in an Army-style barracks, for at least a full minute, panicking just a little before he remembered the DEO.

He wondered if May ever woke feeling like this. Nah, probably not.

Despite his training--to distrust federal agencies like the FBI and CIA--he couldn't help liking his counterparts at the DEO. The dour director, J'onzz, probably wouldn't understand a joke if it hit him straight in the head, and his second-in-command was matching up dour for dour and serious for serious, and hell, even traumatized for traumatized with the best of his SHIELD agents. 

And Agent Piper/Vasquez was another problem that he and May would have to reckon with eventually. While he understood that she had been tasked with going into SHIELD undercover because of the DEO's fear that SHIELD was drawing alien attacks to Earth (and they were right about that) and then the fear that the former director might be an alien (and they weren't all the way wrong on that either), it bothered him that a mole had managed to slip in that easily. Of course with all the rest of the craziness that had been going on, an agent from a friendly organization slipping in unnoticed and serving honorably was the least of his problems.

But still. There was the matter of pride, after all.

Coulson sighed, then looked at the time on his phone. Almost five a.m. Time to find the gym and join May for tai chi.

//

Later, when they arrived at the command center for the day's briefing, Supergirl was looking annoyed, but she said nothing as tasks were handed out. Alex was to show May their armory and familiarize her with their alien weapons. Supergirl was told to give Coulson the tour of the DEO. Coulson saw a crinkle form on her brow and said, "Director Henshaw, much as I would love to make the acquaintance of your resident superhero, surely there are more important things she should be doing?"

He saw a flash of gratitude that she quickly covered. "No, it's all right sir. My powers are a bit sketchy this morning from all the work yesterday. I'd be happy to show you around."

It was, to be honest, a fun tour. The woman was like sunshine on legs. The moment they walked into any of the departments--HR for the NDAs, the labs, the training rooms--agents already there burst into huge smiles and greeted her warmly. Pam from HR called her "Hon" and offered them homemade chocolate chip oatmeal cookies. The labtechs proudly showed her the alien blood samples they were examining, explaining about the different base metals in different species' blood, the evidence of mercury poisoning in this particular sample, and then some things that Coulson didn't follow although Supergirl certainly appeared to. 

In the armory, Alex was explaining to May about the more exciting bits of alien weaponry, what they knew so far about how they worked and what kind of damage they could do. May looked quietly pleased. Coulson knew what that meant. (Anyone else as happy as she was would be bouncing up and down and squealing. Hell, if he were as happy as she was now? He would be bouncing up and down and squealing.) This Alex Danvers was winning over May. Impressive.

Everywhere they went it was the same. Although physically everybody at the DEO looked exhausted, and from what he had been able to tell, like everyone else in National City, they were clearly traumatized, the sight of the Danvers sisters seemed to make everyone look happy, light-hearted, gay, even.

At twelve-thirty, he heard an enormous grumble and Supergirl looked embarrassed. 

"Sorry," she said. "Even when I'm not flying around, I have to consume a ridiculous number of calories every day. Would you like to go to lunch?"

"Any good Asian places in National City?"

"Japanese, Chinese or Thai?"

"Chinese."

Supergirl grinned and the sun got brighter. "I know a place. But you'll have to fill out one more NDA with Pam if we're going to do this."

"Seriously? You don't want people to know about your Chinese food place?"

"It's... a little bit more complicated than that..."

//

The Chinese restaurant that Sup-- that Kara Danvers brought him to was newly renovated after the damage it sustained during the Battle of New York, and it had a weekly special for members with a SuperChow card, that looked like food for six but was priced for four. Privately, he wondered if the owners of the restaurant had signed the NDA that he had just signed, the one that said they promised to never tell a soul that Kara Danvers was Supergirl. 

This week was Egg Drop Soup, General Gao's Chicken, Sesame Beef and potstickers. Kara's eyes just sparkled. Coulson found himself dazzled. He wondered if, had he met Skye/Daisy Johnson earlier, when she was young and before the worst of the constant shift from one foster home to the next had robbed her of her innocent faith in people... But such thoughts were fruitless. They had all done what they had had to do, and grown, and changed, and lost... different things. Just as these DEO agents had.

So he ate with gusto and then watched her eat the rest of the food with even more gusto. She told him stories about missions, about funny things agents did--the time Agent Vasquez had plastered the old Nevada site of the DEO with mistletoe at Christmas, the time her sister had beat the Toyman at his own game, using a child's jacks as caltrops.

He started to tell her about the bus, but her eyes goggled. 

"Seriously? You guys work out of a bus? I mean, the DEO doesn't get the funding it needs, J'onn, Hank complains about that all the time, but at least they have a bunch of black SUVs... Oh, wait, maybe your bus is like those tour buses that rock stars use?"

And he had explained that "bus" was just shorthand for an airborne mobile command station, an airplane, a very cool matte black airplane, in fact. Finally, he asked her, "What is it actually like to be a superhero?"

She grinned at him, and then her smile faltered. "It's a lot of things," she said slowly. "It's amazing when you can help people and devastating when you can't. It's exhausting having an alter ego, but if I didn't have a day job I would have burned out only a few months into the job. And my sister. Without her... Well, and now I have the DEO and they're like my family, my second, well, third really, family."

And Coulson nodded, because he knew Superman's story and he'd heard that Supergirl was actually older, or she had been when she had left Krypton, the dead planet that now she alone remembered. So he changed the subject, talked about Captain America (and they fangirled about him together, just a little bit) and he talked about the Avengers and the Battle of New York and he tried very, very hard to forget about the life he lost when he died right before that battle. He died, just for a little while, but to the world, he had died for good. And he had lost a lot of people that day.

Not an entire planet of friends and family. He would never claim that his trauma was like that. But you couldn't really compare traumas. All you could do was support each other through them. So he told her the good stories, and she told him the good stories, and he thought, I like these DEO people. They're good people.

We should help them save the world.


	33. The Fifth Time I Smiled This Year

Normally, Lillian worked alone. She had her lab techs, of course, her goons, her servants, her lackeys. But it had been a long time since she had a partner. And Maxwell Lord was no Lex or Lionel, but at least he could keep up with her. She was used to working with geniuses. It sped things along. And when he saw her plans for the cyborgs, when she introduced him to the… volunteers, he let go of his caution and skepticism and practically signed on right there.

Her idea had been simple, really. Hundreds of people had been hurt during the Daxamite invasion, many of them maimed, losing limbs. Lord Technologies had gone in and given these people smart limbs, hands, feet, arms and legs that could do more than the victims' previous natural limbs could have done. Now Cadmus simply wanted to piggyback on the smart limbs, make them... smarter. More lethal.

More powerful. More able to read and respond to the environment. All that.

And Max Lord couldn't help himself. He liked what he saw. Lillian smiled.

And Lillian rarely smiled. In the past year, she can remember smiling three times: when John Corben's heart was replaced with a kryptonite power core, when she showed Lena the rocket launcher, and when Corben broke out of the trial by shooting kryptonite at the judge and jury, creating absolute chaos.

Oh, also when Lena had made Lex's device work and before Lillian had realized that Lena had made it so that Lillian couldn't simply turn it on. But she preferred not to think about that.

Watching Max Lord drool while he looked at her incipient army, many of the soldiers people that his company had helped when they lost their limbs, Lillian smiled. She was a firm believer in turning misfortune into opportunities, which she felt that she had done for almost two dozen of these people, turning victims into heroes, protectors of the planet.

So when she offered Max the opportunity of freedom, and he got distracted and refused the offer, because he was too busy designing a new kind of smart prosthetic that did more, better, faster, Lillian just kept smiling.

Because chaos always made her very happy, and what she could foresee from their efforts to build an army of cyborg supersoldiers? That just made her very, very happy.


	34. When I Have Abandoned Frowning

Vasquez’s mind was in overdrive. She stood in the lab, watching Alex’s long-fingered hands tease apart the apparently human flesh surrounding the definitely alien-looking device. They had picked up a lot of bloodies parts like this after the latest fight with Cadmus. Vasquez guessed that the group was making more cyborgs, but she was shocked by how many of them they had seen. She knew that Lillian Luthor was fairly loose in her definition of the concept “volunteer,” but this?

Alex grunted.

“What?” asked Vasquez.

“Most of these have been alien. This and another one I looked at earlier, I’d almost swear they were LordTech.”

“So Lillian has stolen his tech? Or is adding on to his existing tech? A few of the speakers at the rally looked like the victims from the Daxamites, the ones on the news, who got smart prosthetics made by LordTech. So either Lillian hijacked their prosthetics or, wait, she kidnapped him. Of course it was her. And now she’s forcing him to extend his tech beyond simply replacing functionalities to make supersoldiers.”

Alex rolled her eyes. “Forcing him? Please. Those two are probably totally in cahoots.”

Vasquez grinned as she made her way from the lab back to the command center. In cahoots. Only a Danvers girl would still say “in cahoots.” That was totally Kara’s influence. Vasquez chuckled. The night before she had even heard Alex say, “Golly!” in a totally non-ironic way. Agent Alex Badass-Kill-You-With-My Finger-Danvers had said, “Golly!”

Okay, so admittedly, Vasquez had been licking her in interesting places at the time, but still.

As she moved through the corridors, other agents in black dodged to get out of her way, which was odd, because, yes, she was walking more quickly than usual, but they were also giving her odd looks.

At the command center, J’onn was standing behind Winn with his arms crossed. “Agent Vasquez. You look… pleased.”

“Yes, sir. Agent Danvers said some of the tech we picked up from the Cadmus fight looks like LordTech’s work.”

“And Lord is still missing. Contact Detective Sawyer. Let her know what you’ve found.”

“Yes, sir!” She grinned at him.

Winn looked scared.

“What’s wrong, Little Plaid Shirt?”

“Um, Agent Vasquez?”

“Yes?”

“Are you… happy?”

“What? Yes, I am. Why? What has that got to do with LordTech?”

“Nothing. It’s just, you, you never smile. This, this is very weird.”

J’onn emitted a small groan. “Winn, Vasquez is in love. That can lead to strange behavior. Vasquez, please think more quietly. Thank you.” He marched away, shaking his head.

Vasquez tried not to smile, and failed, utterly.


	35. Overtime

Maggie hadn't worked this much overtime since her years in Gotham. Between the fallout from the fight in the park and the mysterious alien deaths, all the precincts were overworked, and the Science Division more than the rest. Then Vasquez had called with the news that Max Lord's kidnapping might be a Science case after all, which was the last thing she needed. At least Lucy Lane was coming back to National City for a few days, to consult with J'onn, but also to get some R&R with Maggie. It felt like months since they had seen each other. Maggie really needed to get laid, but even more than that, she needed a hug, needed to lose herself in those enormous grey eyes. She would cook for her, maybe paella and stirfry, get a nice bottle of wine, some tiramisu...

Her musings were interrupted by her phone ringing.

"Sawyer."

"Danvers. Is there any way I could talk to the Medical Examiner about those alien bodies, maybe get tissue samples to test?"

"Did you find something?"

"Not sure. The ME's human, right? How much does he know about aliens?"

"She. Don't know. Not much, I'd assume."

"We may need to talk to Lena then. With that alien hospital, she may know a xenobiologist we can consult."

"I'll contact the ME. We can meet at the coroner's office tomorrow. I'll text you the time."

"Excellent. Thanks, Maggie."

Maggie hung up, sighing. She wondered if it was true, the rumor she'd heard at the DEO, that Alex and Vasquez were engaged.

Her heart twisted. Vasquez had taken Alex on, fresh off the boat and all, and it was actually working out. And Maggie was happy for Alex, of course she was, wanted only the best for her, of course she did.

But she was insanely jealous of Vasquez.


	36. Disturbing Discoveries

Alex didn't mind dead bodies. Even in medical school with the watch-one/do-one/teach-one approach to autopsies, she had always been the one person who had never flinched and certainly never fainted. She just didn't particularly like coroners' offices, with the sterile stainless steel filing cabinets containing objects that had once been people. And she could tell that Maggie Sawyer didn't much care for it either: the forefinger under the lip was her tell.

But as the ME, a blonde in stiletto heels and a white labcoat, explained the anomalies she had noted in her reports, Alex saw Maggie glance down at Alex's left hand and then relax. And Alex knew what that meant.

She rubbed her eyes. "I'm sorry, Dr. Isles, can you repeat that?"

"At first I thought it was steroids, but then I also detected an unusual protein. So I went back and tested samples from earlier similar cases. And I've never seen anything like it." She led them to the next room and pointed to a computer readout.

Alex swallowed. "I think I have. I've filed the paperwork to get samples for our lab to run tests on. We have a few pieces of equipment you don't have here. Thank you very much for being so meticulous, Doctor."

"You're quite welcome. I'll have the samples sent over once I get clearance."

Alex grabbed Maggie's arm and practically dragged her out of the building, into the sunshine and cool breeze. 

"Alex, slow down! Have you been taking vice grip lessons from Kara? What is going on?"

"Maggie, those bodies-- They may have had Martian DNA in them."

Maggie stared. Above them the flags smacked back and forth in the wind, leaving the metal part of the halyards to clink against the flagpoles. "But how, that's not even, but there are only two--"

"That we know of. And I think it's time we talked to them."

//

By the time they got back to the DEO, Supergirl was pacing around the command center, Winn was typing frantically at his computer and J'onn was standing behind him with his arms crossed over his chest. He looked pissed. Vasquez looked pissed. When M'gann hurried in, she looked terrified.

Alex said, "Thanks for coming in, M'gann. I'll need to take blood samples from both of you to compare against the samples Dr. Isles is sending over."

J'onn said, "I thought the reports said that the victims were human, or at least part human."

"I am hypothesizing now that they aren't half and half. I'm thinking they are humans who have been given Martian blood. And it changed them, turning them green, for starters. And it eventually killed them."

"They died in different ways, though. The reports said it looked like natural causes."

Alex sighed. "When a body rejects an implant or a transplant, it can happen in different ways. I am assuming that this is like that."

"Who would do something like this?" Supergirl growled. "It can't be Cadmus. They hate aliens. And Max Lord does some stupid things, but he wouldn't willingly try to turn humans into aliens."

Vasquez hummed. "I wonder. What if the green skin wasn't the point? What if it was just a side effect?"

They stared at her.

She continued, "Most of these bodies show the kinds of things we would expect of humans who had been abusing steroids: their muscles are impressive but their hair isn't. They're brains have been soaked with adrenaline. Their joints have been strained beyond what is normal."

Winn said, "They all worked construction, but for different companies."

"So what if somebody created a performance-enhancement drug or cybernetic device or implant... that went wrong?" asked Vasquez.

Alex scoffed. "What? First it turned them green and then it killed them?"

But as the rest of her team went silent, it occurred to her that this, well, was National City. And what could go wrong generally did go wrong.

Maggie offered, "Um, yes?"

J'onn sighed. "So what do we do now? Find out the culprit? Try to figure out a cure for others out there dealing with this? Identify the construction companies hiring people who have these markers?"

Alex said, "We'll need to devise a test that can recognize the markers. I have some ideas..."

Winn said, "And really, all of the above makes a certain amount of sense. Maybe we let Alex find the test and the cure. I can work on which companies might be hiring these people."

Vasquez growled, "And I will figure out which bastard--or bitch, to be fair--is to blame for this shit. Because how many did you tell us, Maggie? Twelve victims?"

Maggie shook her head. "That was last week. We're up to seventeen now. This is definitely serial killer territory."

J'onn rasped, "Then let's find him. Or her. Or whatever group is involved. And take them down."


	37. Hot Date

Jess was a little excited to be meeting Winn for dinner at Noonan's. It had been, what?, three years since her last date? And she didn't hold that against Lena, of course she didn't. The moving bonus that she had received had allowed her to actually buy a condo--not huge, but bigger than her apartment in Metropolis. And the raise had allowed her to keep on paying that mortgage, and even adopt a cat.

So Jess was happy as it was.

But when Lena had started working with that DEO agent, the brilliant Winn Schott, Jr., Jess had gone... well, just a little soft. Because he was cute. And a genius. Okay, not as genius as Lena, but genius enough that he keeps up with Jess's boss. And that is not common.

So she looked forward to their date all week, but then Jess spent Friday afternoon putting out one fire after another, in one case literally after an employee put a sandwich wrapped in aluminum foil in the breakroom microwave. If he had been an engineer, eh would have been fired (because, science) but he was an accountant and mortified, so she let him off with a warning.

Then there was the heart attack of the construction worker at the site of the new clinic, the audit of the computer division, and the irate shareholders who demanded to see Lena, who was in Metropolis for the day on business. At the end of the day, Jess still hadn't finished up her regular work, so she called Winn to tell him she would be late to dinner at Noonan's.

"No problemo!" said Winn.

"So just get us a table and order something. I'm ravenous."

"When did you eat lunch?"

"You know," said Jess. "I'm not sure I did."

"What are you hungry for?"

"Whatever you pick will be fine." And she wasn't entirely convinced that it would be true, but she was too tired to care.

She had not reckoned on Winn being so, well... Winn.

When she finally got to the restaurant, she saw him burst into a huge smile. He jumped up and pulled out her chair for her, and when was the last time a guy had done that?

There were four plates on the table: a salad, some pasta with a pale pink sauce, some roasted vegetables and a cup of pale broth.

"Start with the soup," said Winn. "I already had mine. It's really delicate, miso-based. I love it. See what you think."

The taste made Jess smile, and she drank it down.

"I thought we could split the rest? The pasta is lobster ravioli in a lobster and wine sauce. Kara loves it. The salad--I asked the waiter for a recommendation for somebody who eats healthy but has a sweet tooth. So it's spinach and feta and sweet dried cranberries and I forgot the rest but it looks pretty, so... And the roasted vegetables have a balsamic reduction. So healthy, but a little sweet. Kinda like, you know. You."

Jess leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, making him blush.

They shared the rest of the three plates, and Jess loved them all, and she was looking at Winn in his little plaid shirt and old-fashioned knitted necktie, with his mild five o'clock shadow, and she felt sort of soft and warm. This was different from the kinds of guys she had dated in college (jocks) and grad school (hard-nosed entrepreneur wanna-bes). Instead, Winn was a geek and a nerd and a very sweet person. Suddenly, it occurred to her that Winn had once referred to Kara as his best friend, and she suddenly understood how sunshine, like flame, could replicate itself.

But then a voice interrupted them. "Hey! Guys! Fancy meeting you here!"

They looked up to see the blue alien, Brian, in his signature bad suit and tie. Actually, he looked a little green around the gills, literally, but Jess thought asking him if he were feeling okay would both be rude and encourage him to stick around, which she didn't want.

"Yes," she said, smiling stiffly. "We're on a date!"

"You're dating? That's so cute! Congratulations! Who asked who out first?"

Winn blushed. "I did."

"Aww, that's awesome! I love seeing people happy! Say, I know this seems out of the blue, but everybody in National City is working 24/7 these days, you know? It's like everybody is terminally exhausted."

Jess rubbed her eyes. "You've got that right."

"I mean, even Supergirl is looking a little worn out, you know?"

Winn frowned. "No, she's not."

"Oh, yeah. She is. She came by the place I've been working 'cause a guy had a heart attack and they didn't thing the ambulance could get there in time during rush hour. She looked wrecked."

Jess said, "She's been working overtime too, if superheroes even have overtime."

Winn said, "Where are you working now, Brian?"

"Oh, this was over at the Luthor alien clinic, near the port. Just outside of the warehouse district."

"The warehouse district," Winn repeated slowly. "And what is your job there?"

"Oh, my job isn't there, not exactly. I'm an independent contractor, selling nutritional supplements."

Jess frowned. "At the clinic site?"

Winn said, "What kind of nutritional supplements?"

"Yeah, um, well I started out selling energy drinks, but then I got this gig selling vitamins that make the workers more productive. It's a combination of caffeine, ginseng and vitamin G."

Jess started, "There is no--"

But Winn cut in. "That sounds fantastic, Brian. I don't suppose you have a sample on you? I know my boss would totally like my productivity to increase."

Jess said, "Winn, I don't think--"

But Brian had a bottle out in no time. "It's 19.99 for 100 units. Quite a deal, if I do say so."

Winn handed him a twenty. "Keep the change, but I'll need a receipt. You know, for my medical deduction."

Brian wrote out a detailed receipt and left smiling.

Jess frowned at Winn. "You know that this is probably a scam, right?"

Winn sighed. "It's Brian. So, no, it's not a scam. It's probably a felony."


	38. Where Do I Fit In?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Comments are always welcome! (And Kudos, of course :D )

Kara spent the weekend doing Supergirl duties. On Monday morning, she came into CatCo already exhausted. She and James went back to the construction site for Lena’s alien hospital and interviewed the heart attack victim’s coworkers, many of whom were aliens of an assortment of colors. When Kara asked if there had been any other accidents or health problems on the site, the site manager hustled his employees off and said he didn’t have time to talk further, and he wouldn’t give them a quote. James took pictures of the site anyway and complimented the man on the speed his people were achieving, but he just shrugged.

As they walked back to James’s car, he said, “Well, whoops. What do you know. I accidentally left my phone’s microphone on. Imagine that.”

Kara said, “It’s not legal to tape an interview if the people don’t agree to it.”

“Depends on what it’s used for. Like if I also accidentally send it by email to the guy’s boss’s boss, for example?”

“Do you even know who his boss’s boss is?”

James rolled his eyes. “I just sent it to Lena, Kara.”

“Oh!”

They got into his car and he looked over at her as she leaned her head against the passenger seat headrest. “Are you okay? You haven’t let up once since…”

“I let up once. I went to Dollywood with Lena and Winn last weekend.”

“Lena and Winn.”

“Yeah. It was good to catch up with them.”

 

“Yeah, um, Kara. I don’t want to tell you how to live your life, but I feel like I have a little more experience with relationships than you have, so I have some advice if you want it…”

She met his eyes. “Okay.”

“Winn is your friend. You catch up with friends. Lena is your girlfriend. You don’t let your girlfriend go long enough that the next time you see her you have to catch up. You catch up every day.”

“James…”

“Let me finish, please, Kara. I learned this the hard way with Lucy. I let my job at the Planet and my work with Clark get in the way when I was with her, and it wasn’t just me. She tends to overwork too, which I know that Lena does. You need to talk about it, figure out what the other person needs, figure out what you need. And then spend time together, even if you’re both doing work.”

“I don’t think she wants to see me right now,” Kara said in a small voice.

“Do you want to see her?”

“Desperately.”

“Then start small. Coffee. Ask her what she’s working on. Isn’t that how you two got together in the first place?”

“Yes.”

“You gotta make it right, Kara.”

“I know. I just, I don’t know where to start.”

“Start in the middle. Just ask to see her. Have coffee. Chat. Lather, rinse, repeat.”

“Thanks, James. You’re a good friend.”

“The best.”

“And humble, too. Did I mention that?”

He just laughed and drove them back to CatCo.

//

Kara was working on her fourth revision for Snapper when Maggie called, sounding frustrated and hurried. “Hey, Maggie, what’s up?”

“Hey, Little Danvers. Got a problem. I’m supposed to pick Lucy up at the airport, but we just got called to help another precinct with a hostage negotiation.”

“Text me her flight number. Go save the hostages.”

Kara flew to the airport, then speed-changed back into her street clothes. She was twenty minutes early. She sat in the terminal watching the arrivals, thinking about the last time Maggie had to do hostage negotiation and she had swooped in and broken a building and put the case on unfirm ground legally and started the fight that ended with Alex getting kidnapped and every decision she had made that day was the wrong one. Remembering the sight of Alex’s seemingly lifeless body floating in the tank and the tank exploding and her body rushed toward them on the tide of water across the floor… Rao, it made her sick even thinking of it.

Had it made her too cautious? Had it made her focus on the purely physical aspect of her job because she didn’t trust her own judgment? Had it made her avoid Lena so that the other woman—the most beautiful, generous, brave, kind woman she knew—didn’t have to see Kara’s brokenness? By the time Lucy came out of the terminal, dressed in camos and carrying her duffle, Kara was halfway into a full-blown panic attack. She hugged Lucy hard.

"Kar-- Kara-- Can't breathe..."

"Oh! Sorry!" She let go and Lucy gasped for breath. "Um, since last time I picked you up on Alex's bike, I had forgotten about your gear, I thought this time we'd take a cab--"

Both their phones rang at the same time.

"Supergirl," said Alex. "We need you here at the DEO stat!"

"I'm at the airport, picking up Lucy--"

"Bring her along if you can avoid being seen. There's a huge hostage mess at NCU, in the science building. NCPD--which is to say Maggie--has asked for your help."

Kara hung up and looked at Lucy's paling face.

"Maggie," said Lucy.

"Meet me around the corner," said Kara.

And although carrying a woman and her duffle across National City at superspeed was a new experience for Supergirl (and Lucy), they got to the DEO in record time. Supergirl set Lucy on her feet on the balcony and strode toward the command center where Winn and Vasquez sat at their posts below the viewscreens and Alex and J'onn stood behind them frowning, both with their hands on their hips. Lucy joined them, trying to pop her ears.

Without preamble, Alex said, "A squad of men in tactical gear swarmed a conference room at the Science Center, where a group of alien physicians were meeting. They used a gas to knock out the aliens, but before they could get them out, university security had them surrounded. NCU really upgraded their security after all the alien attacks last year. But then shots were fired and the attackers barricaded themselves in with the doctors. NCPD responded. Maggie was leading the negotiation."

Lucy snapped. "What do you mean was?"

"Just now, one of the school's security team went off-book and started shooting. Now they're threatening a suicide bomb if police don't back off."

Winn added, "They're not bluffing. They've got alien tech that could take out a city block."

"And they've got Maggie now."

Supergirl froze. "What? What do we do?"

Lucy growled, "What we were trained to do."


	39. What We Were Trained to Do

The first thing Major Lane did was create a perimeter around the Science Center of the university, about two blocks in diameter; in her experience, things always ended up being messier than the experts predicted. Then the DEO agents held the line while the NCPD worked to evacuate the buildings nearby. Then she tried to reopen negotiations with the hostage takers. But their response was laden with arguments about the “cause” of eliminating the alien menace,” etc., etc., and Vasquez in her earpiece said they sounded like Cadmus, which was no surprise.

So the second thing Major Lane did was set up her two main cannons on either side of the Science Center, on the roofs, and she had her x-ray reconnaissance narrating what was going on in the conference room inside.

The third thing Major Lane did was keep talking to the hostage takers.

Because Lucy was tough and Lucy was experienced and Lucy was mad as hell that these xenophobic idiots had managed to capture her girlfriend. And she knew her girlfriend, who was a good cop, one of the best, and an amazing hostage negotiator. And rule number six of hostage negotiation was that if you end up being one of the hostages (and your kidnappers aren’t raving lunatics), you keep negotiating. Lucy had no doubt that Maggie was probably talking, asking what they wanted, offering them options that didn’t include mass murder and suicide. Maggie was being that other kind of “good cop,” which left Lucy space to be the bad cop.

Major Lane glanced at the DEO agents around her, and drily noted their nervous looks.

Good.

If her own agents were scared of her, the motherfuckers who had made the fatal mistake of capturing her girlfriend (and a dozen innocent alien doctors) didn’t stand a chance.

So she talked. She left calming, cajoling and offering more life-fucking-affirming possibilities to Maggie. Major Lane, in contrast, was free to threaten and draw a picture of the devastation of the hostage-takers bad choices, their bloody, painful deaths, their families’ grief and implication in their crimes. When her x-ray technician let her know that they were getting antsy and their heart rates were spiking (because of course her x-ray technician was Supergirl), Major Lane gave the sign to set off the cannons.

From the north side of the building, a blue and red streak cut the air. From the south side, a green and black streak screamed toward the building. Two concussive explosions shook the quad.

Major Lane smiled. “Five, four, three, two—“

Supergirl dragged out two battered men by the ankles. Their tactical gear was torn and bloody. She dumped them in the quad and went back. A third man went flying out the door, and the Martian Manhunter came out with one over his shoulder and another dragged out by the arm.

Then Supergirl led out a crowd of relieved aliens and one Detective Maggie Sawyer.

Major Lane nodded to herself. Mission accomplished. The NCPD took the men into custody and she and her agents returned to the DEO to disarm and debrief. Three hours later, Detective Maggie Sawyer walked into the DEO command center and all the agents turned and started clapping and cheering, making so much noise that Lucy almost couldn’t hear the suggestion that Vasquez was whispering into her ear. Almost. She looked back at Vasquez and grinned.

Stepping forward, she took a grinning Maggie in her arms, bent her backwards and kissed her quite thoroughly, to even more cheering from the peanut gallery. When they separated, Maggie took Lucy’s hand in one of her hands and the duffel bag in the other, and they walked out together, Alex giving Lucy a high five as they left.


	40. Some Aftermaths Are Better Than Others

The applause rang in Maggie’s ears, and she bent over laughing, but she only had eyes for Lucy Lane, whose hard look belied the anxiety she was no doubt feeling, repressing. And when Lucy leaned in to hear what Vasquez (with that evil little grin) was saying to her, Maggie knew that she should just go with whatever Lucy did next. So the kiss?

Magical.

And seeing Alex give Lucy a high five afterwards, as they left the DEO? Bittersweet. Because a part of her couldn’t help thinking that if things had gone a different way, it might have been Alex bending her back for a highly public kiss in front of the DEO—

Yeah. In an alternate universe perhaps. One where Maggie had less fear, more faith. One where she had more game and chill than Agent Vasquez…

Sure. Right. As if her life could ever be as cool as a TV show.

But she couldn’t complain too much. In this universe, they were taking an Uber back to Maggie’s place and her grey-eyed goddess was whispering into her ear the things Lucy wanted to do with her, the places she wanted to kiss her, run her hands, her lips, her tongue…

There were worse universes to be stuck in, Maggie supposed.

They barely got in the door before Lucy was kissing her, unbuttoning her, murmuring, “I know, I know, you’ve got a job to do, a job you’re crazy good at, and I could never, never tell you not to do your job, but you scared me, and I know, you don’t have to tell me, I know that you kept talking, kept negotiating, kept doing your damn job even after that rookie fucked everything up—“

And there was a moment that only included kissing and groping and gasping for breath. Maggie struggled with the buttons and zipper of Lucy’s camos. “But you had my back, Lane, you always had my back.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t know that,” said Lucy, struggling to tug Maggie’s black skinny jeans off her legs.

“Supergirl was picking you up, and I know the DEO, so I was pretty sure they would hand off the op to you and her, and Little Danvers loves me, even if—And I wasn’t wrong. So yeah, I just kept talking until the Girl of Steel exploded through the wall and sent those Cadmus idiots flying. She had the explosive vest off the leader and in little pieces before I could even pick myself up from the floor…”

Lucy paused in kissing Maggie. “I was terrified that she wouldn’t be able to disarm it in time.”

“Little Danvers is fast, and much smarter than anybody gives her credit for.”

“I know, but—“

“Lane. Shut up and kiss me.”


	41. Learning to Forgive

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With all that went down a SDCC, I chose to end this as I did because we need to remember that the actors and the characters are different. That's why we're all here on Ao3.
> 
> Jeremy Jordan is a straight white guy who has never failed to see himself represented. He got schooled and hopefully knows better now. As for the other actors laughing, in social psych they have shown that sometimes when people are embarrassed or in shock, they laugh, which is why it is so hard to shut down socially inappropriate jokes, because the people who genuinely think it's funny laugh but sometimes the people who are appalled laugh too out of embarrassment. So JJ needs to take the blame, but I will give the other actors the benefit of the doubt until they really prove themselves to not be the allies they probably thought they were. And kudos to Katie for not laughing and for handling her interview with great respect to the fans and the ship.
> 
> I understand if people are too hurt to keep watching or reading. I will keep watching the episodes so that I can keep rewriting and fixing them. And I will keep writing SuperCorp during the hiatus to that we have somewhere to go to see it since we probably won't get it from these writers and producers.
> 
> Be strong. The multiverse theory says on some universe, SuperCorp becomes canon.

Lena woke up with a song in her head (which at least distracted her from the fact that she woke up alone, again). She moved to the beat of it as she ate her yogurt and granola (and didn't think at all about stacks of pancakes), as Ted drove her to L-Corp (and she didn't scan the skies for a flash of red and blue), and as she listened to Jess tell her the schedule for the day, including the working lunch with her R&D engineers.

It followed her from one meeting to the next, through lunch, until she finally had a free hour to go over the quarterly reports with a glass of iced tea on her couch.

This woman is my destiny  
I said, "Ooh ooh--  
Shut up and dance with me!"

Jess had rarely walked in on Lena dancing with her tablet, and she didn't bat an eye this time, but Lena flushed anyway.

"Earworm," she said by way of explanation.

"Yes, ma'am. Detective Sawyer is here to see you. She says she's not here to arrest you."

"Well, that's hopeful."

Maggie entered, looking worried, but Lena supposed that was simply a professional hazard of being a cop, sort of like teachers with chalkdust on their sleeves.

"What can I do for you, Detective?" She gestured for Maggie to take a seat as she herself sat behind her desk.

"I'm sure you heard about the situation at NCU yesterday, with the hostages."

Lena nodded, not commenting on Maggie or Supergirl's role in the event.

"What we didn't tell the press was why the kidnappers chose those doctors as their target."

Lena shrugged. "I understand of them were aliens."

"All of them were. Some just are able to pass as humans."

"For a lot of people, that would be enough."

"Exactly. It was Cadmus."

"Oh, Mother," Lena groaned. "What now?"

"The doctors were having a weekly meeting, comparing notes from their work at National City General Hospital."

Lena allowed herself a frown. "My doctors."

"We think this may be part of a larger project, possibly with LordTech. The NCPD and the DEO are working together on this. Director Henshaw though it might be helpful if you joined us on this. We've also got a woman from LordTech who has come forward as a whistle blower. She doesn't think Max knew about the leaks of his tech, but he hates aliens and admires brilliant use of tech. And well, sorry, Lena, but your mother--"

"Is brilliant and hates aliens. They're practically made for each other."

"Would you be willing to join us at the DEO? I offered to bring you myself. I figured, even with our difficult... history, it might be easier if it were me rather than... other people."

"That's very thoughtful, Detective. I appreciate that. Yes, let me clear my schedule with Jess and then I will join you."

//

Maggie and Lena marched into the DEO together, Lena in her heels towering over the petite detective. Lena felt a wave of nostalgia, remembering how she and Winn had worked together to figure out how to rescue K-- Supergirl from that alternate Earth. Winn. She hadn't seen him nearly enough lately, her brother from another mother. He was deeply loyal to Kara, and Lena couldn't bear to be around people who loved Kara so much if she couldn't be around her girlfr-- the Girl of Steel herself.

Lena followed Maggie into the conference room, where the DEO agents and some of the alien doctors were gathered. 

The moment he saw Lena, Winn jumped up and hugged her, to her great surprise.

"Lena! It's been too long! Welcome back, partner!"

"Um, I, well, thank you, Winn. It's good to see you."

Director Henshaw rose and gave Lena his hand. "Ms. Luthor, thank you for joining us. I think you know everyone here."

Alex, Vasquez and the doctors all smiled or waved. Supergirl was absent.

Winn pulled out the last empty chair for Lena, and they all turned their attention to Hank.

He said, "Thanks to the fine work of the NCPD and Agent Danvers, and the courage of a LordTech employee who couldn't join us today, we think we may have enough information to figure out what Cadmus is up to most recently. Big surprise, it isn't good. Agent Danvers?"

Alex stood and pointed the remote at the computer monitor on the wall, showing several pieces of some tech, some of them broken or half melted, probably, Lena suspected, by Supergirl.

"These are from the fight in Jefferson Park," said Alex. "We think that Cadmus has been recruiting some of the people injured during the Daxamite invasion, people who were given smart prosthetics by LordTech. Cadmus has hacked that technology to make them cyborgs. What we saw in the fight was the start of a cyborg militia, the tech compensating so that humans can be as strong and deadly as aliens, or more so."

She clicked the remote to show a chemical breakdown. "This may or may not be related. It's the ingredients in a drub that's been making the rounds of National City, called Vitamin G. It's a combination of steroid and stimulant."

Winn added, "Like cocaine that also helps you build muscle?"

"Exactly. We started seeing it in suspicious deaths, but we now know that it's being peddled at construction sites, to get workers to work harder, longer."

Maggie said, "NCPD just issued a warning to all the construction companies in the city, and the mayor is pushing for mandatory drug testing."

"This stuff kills," said Vasquez, frowning. "Also, funny side effect, it turns humans who take it green."

Lena said, "I don't recognize that last ingredient."

"Martian blood," growled Henshaw. "White Martian blood."

The alien doctors muttered among themselves.

"It's not Cadmus," said Lena authoritatively. "My mother would never knowingly 'taint' a human with alien body parts, sorry. Tech, sure. That's just leveling the playing field. But this? No."

One of the alien doctors, Skof, the Valerian, said, "We've seen no Martians at the clinics we've held."

Vasquez said, "The two Martians we fought a few months ago, their corpses were incinerated. The blood didn't come from them."

"Could it be synthetic?" asked Lena.

"That's what I thought too," said Alex, nodding. "Especially with this much of it. But to make it they would have had to start with a sample of the real thing, to know what they were synthesizing."

"So we don't know who's making it," said Maggie. "Do we know who's dealing it?"

Winn said, "I got the sample from Brian. I'd say he's clueless about what he's selling people."

"But he'll know the people he got it from. I'll put a BOLO out and bring him in for a talk."

Lena asked, "Why would people take this stuff if it turns them green?"

"And then kills them," said Maggie. "The morgue is just full of green humans. At first we thought it was a serial killer."

Alex nodded. "We think there are addictive qualities. Also, some construction companies are paying the really strong aliens premium..."

"By the way, Ms. Luthor," said Hank. "We think the heart attack victim at the site of your clinic was one of these deaths."

"I've already been looking into irregularities at my site," said Lena. "I've received... information that the site manager has been doing questionable things. My lawyers are handling it."

"All right, people," said Hank. "Keep your eyes open. If you see something, alert me or Detective Sawyer. Thank you for coming."

They trooped out. Lena put a hand on Winn's arm to slow him down. "Winn, um, where's Supergirl?"

"On patrol. Lucy's running backend so I could be here for this meeting. Lena, have you guys had a falling out or something? Kara has been looking so sad lately..."

"I know. I need to fix it, but when somebody hurts you... " She sighed deeply.

Winn said, "Sometimes you forgive them for your own sake, not because they deserve it. You can't hold onto the hurt. You have to move beyond it. Do you still love her?"

"With everything I've got."

"Then you can do this, Lena. For both your sakes." He hugged her and she walked out, head held high, grateful that he had her back.


	42. More of the Pieces, Coming Together

When their shift ended, Vasquez turned to Alex. "Buy you a beer?"

"Sure."

They took Vasquez's Beetle. Alex watched her girlfriend drive, left hand on the wheel and right on the stick shift, frowning grimly as she changed gears. 

"Hey, you," said Alex. "Where'd that goofy grin from the other day go?"

Vasquez shot her a smile but then frowned again. "I'm worried."

"About Cadmus?"

"No, Lena's right. We know Cadmus. We know what Lillian wants and what she will and won't do to get it. She's a familiar threat. But all this other weirdness? It stinks."

They drove in silence for a while, Alex just watching Vasquez, knowing that her mind was going a mile a minute, churning out scenarios. Alex sighed. 

"What?" snapped Vasquez.

Alex didn't take it personally. "You're just so cute. Have I told you that recently?"

Vasquez laughed, blushing a little. "How the hell do you do that? I'm a Marine, for fuck's sake! And you just say stuff like that and I get all soft."

"Sorry?"

"No, you're not."

"No," said Alex smiling. "I'm really not."

Dollywood wasn't too busy for a Thursday night. They took their usual booth and when M'gann brought over their beers, Vasquez said, "Hey, M'gann, sit with us for a bit? We need to catch up." 

"Is there a problem?"

Alex remembered that the woman was a telepath.

Vasquez was honest. "A little bit, yeah. Not sure how to ask this. Have you ever donated blood?"

She frowned. "Just that one time, to save J'onn. Why are you asking?"

"Is there any way somebody could have gotten ahold of some of your blood?"

"How would they do that? It's not like I wouldn't notice."

"Dunno. But somebody is out there selling a drug whose base seems to be White Martian blood. Unless there are other White Martians around?"

"No," said M'gann. "They wouldn't hide. They'd rampage." Suddenly she frowned.

"What?"

"Roulette. For the fight club. She did it for all her top fighters, in case we needed a transfusion--"

Alex repeated, "Roulette." It was practically a growl. "I really want to take her down."

M'gann shook her head. "You're going to have to find her first."

Vasquez smiled. "Doesn't matter. She's a known quantity. And that is always easier than a new player. Excellent. Thanks, M'gann." She finished her beer. "C'mon, babe. Let's go home and I'll make dinner. How does fettuccine Alfredo sound?"

To M'gann, Alex said, "I don't get it. She cooks like four times a week and I've actually lost weight. And it's really good, so I eat a lot."

"Yes," said Vasquez. "And precisely because it's so good, you always want to show your gratitude afterwards, and that burns calories." She grinned.

Alex said, "Pfft."

M'gann just rolled her eyes. "Go home, you two. And tomorrow, go find Roulette."


	43. Going Through the Motions

Kara couldn't sleep. Even though she'd had a busy day chasing down leads about the mysterious green deaths, stopping a bank robbery and stopping a car with failed breaks on the highway, when she finally put on her white sushi pajamas, and crawled into bed, she lay there staring at the ceiling wide awake. She thought about what James had said about relationships. She ached with missing Lena, but it just all seemed so hopeless. 

In some ways this reminded her of the year after she came to Earth. The first months had been full of frantic activity: learning English, buying a wardrobe, meeting Alex's friends without embarrassing her, home schooling with the Danvers for six months before the school year started again, starting school, struggling to fit in, struggling to deal with the overstimulation, the birds, the music, all the strange things.

But then, after a while, things almost seemed normal. She learned about Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, holidays that were all about food. At first when the trees dropped their leaves, she panicked. Failing flora was one of the signs of a dying planet. But Eliza had talked about the cycle of life, and in the spring, when the leaves returned, at first it had been a relief. But then flowers started blooming everywhere: on the trees and in the grass, and the scent reminded her of her first day, coming out of the pod, landing at the Danvers house with Kal-El, who explained flowers in broken Kryptonese. She burst into tears because after the sensory deprivation of the pod all those years in stasis, waking every few months to the immense blackness, it was all too much. Her planet had exploded and here were pink and blue and red things being beautiful and sending crazy signals to her nose and it was all too much. She went to bed and refused to get up for two weeks.

Her parents told the school it was mono. Eliza stayed home with her and tried to get her to talk, but in the end it was Alex crawling into her bed and talking quietly about her day, Alex who put the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of their bedroom in the form of constellations that could be seen from Krypton, Alex who made the cupcakes for that first Earth birthday.

And eventually she had gotten out of bed, gone back to school, learned how to smile again.

This felt an awful lot like all that, except for the being able to sleep thing.

She stared at her dark ceiling, lit only in passing when a car went by outside. Maybe she should invest in a package of glow-in-the-dark stars... Eventually she drifted off. She dreamed of the Phantom Zone, the unending darkness, and woke up at six in a sweat. She took a long shower, put on the suit, packed the pants and the pink shirt, the oxfords and the glasses and took off. 

Flying in the morning always cleared her mind for a while. High above the city, she could pretend the world was at peace. Then she flew to the roof of CatCo, changed into her Kara clothes and faced reality.

First thing out of the gate, Snapper handed back her article about the green human deaths, with a lot less red scribbles over it. She had names, ages, construction sites, quotes from Detective Sawyer, some anonymous construction workers and one ex-site manager from the university who had quit over the conditions on site, the constant pushing from above for the work to go faster, faster, and their command to turn a blind eye to the use of performance-enhancement drugs. She had leaked emails, anonymous complaints to OSHA, and reports from National City Ambulance to the Centers for Disease Control about the uptick in possible drug-related deaths.

Snapper growled, “Nice work, Danvers. You managed to make the scoop of the year sound as boring as cardboard.”

“You complain when I do anything else.”

“Pep it up.”

“No. I have followed all your rules, gotten a ton of quotes from reputable sources, put ‘allegedly’ in every other sentence, kept my own horror and disgust out of it. You want to make it exciting, you can freaking do it yourself.”

She turned and went back to her office. There on her desk was a small and rather odd bouquet: zinnias and forget-me-nots. There was no note, but there didn’t need to be. She opened her laptop and Googled the meaning of zinnias: thoughts of friends, I miss you, lasting affection. A small, sad smile lit her face. She knew where she was going for lunch that day.

//

Compared to the constant frantic activity in National City, Metropolis was an oasis of calm. Sure, people bustled, but the noise of cranes and jackhammers was largely missing. As she landed in Novis Park and strode across the street, she felt a looseness of something she hadn’t realized was tensed. She strode into Healthy Bites and joined the lunch line. The people around her murmured. Usually she never bought food in her suit (except for the occasional restaurant she’d saved from grease fires and the like; she knew the owners like to know she was still looking out for them). She made an exception this time.

When she reached the front of the line, she said, “Two Kale Salad Specials, please, one with lime juice and one with raspberry vinaigrette.” She paid with cash and left a big tip.

As she left, she heard someone say, “Supergirl eats kale? Seriously?”

//

She landed on the balcony at L-Corp just as Lena was saying goodbye to two men in suits. Lena turned and startled when she saw Supergirl standing on her balcony with the boxes in her hands. Her facial expression settled into something that wasn’t a smile exactly, but wasn’t a frown either.

Lena came and unlocked the balcony door. “Supergirl.”

“Ms. Luthor. I brought lunch, if you’re hungry.”

“Potstickers?”

“Salad.”

The Eyebrow™. “Come, have a seat.”

They sat on the couch. Lena opened the box Supergirl gave her. “Kale?”

“You like it.”

“And you got?”

Supergirl opened hers.

“You are eating kale? Voluntarily?”

“You always tell me it’s good for me.”

“And that’s all you’re having?”

Supergirl shrugged. “I’m not all that hungry.”

Lena stared. “But… you’re always hungry.”

“Not always,” she said, picking at the kale, slowly eating every bit of it without complaining or making a face. “I think it’s like that thing about blind people hearing really well, except sort of the opposite. When everything is really loud, I can’t taste as well, so it’s not as fun.”

“But you brought me lunch anyway.”

“Well, you need to eat, and I know you always forget. So.”

They ate in silence.

Eventually, Supergirl said, “Thank you for the flowers. They’re pretty.”

Lena chewed and swallowed. “Oh, uh, you’re welcome…”

Supergirl looked at the time on her phone and sighed. “I gotta get back to work. Thanks for eating with me.” She stood up, looking tired and sad.

“Supergirl, Kara—“

The superhero turned back from the balcony door. Lena strode over and spread her arms and embraced the Girl of Steel. They stood there for a moment, Kara’s head on Lena’s shoulder. Then with another sad sigh, Kara turned, stepped onto the balcony, and Supergirl leapt into the air.


	44. Her Secret Is Safe with Me

Jess was hard at work, eating a tuna sandwich with one hand while texting a supplier with the other, when Lena stepped out of her office and stood quietly waiting for Jess to finish typing and chewing.

“Ms. Luthor?”

“Jess, did you send Kara Danvers flowers?”

“I might have…”

“What did you send?”

“Zinnias and forget-me-nots.” Jess’s look was defiant.

Lena nodded. “Orange and blue…”

“Yeah, it’s not my favorite color combination either.”

“It’s not about the colors all the time,” said Lena.

“No, it’s not. It’s about communication—“

“Something I have not been very good at lately,” admitted Lena. “Neither of us has.”

Jess diplomatically didn’t comment on that. She saw Lena noticing her not commenting on that and the ghost of a smile that followed.

“She got us kale salads from… one of my favorite restaurants.”

Jess goggled. “Kara I-Never-Met-Unhealthy-Takeout-I-Didn’t-Like ate kale? Actual kale?”

“Mm hmm.”

“But that, I would, she actually, but kale and, I, I just. Huh. Wow.”

“Don’t tell anybody. We don’t want to ruin her reputation.”

“Her secret is safe with me, ma’am.”

Lena nodded, still looking a little worried, but also a little relieved, and went back into her office.

And when, the next day, there was a tiny article in the Daily Planet about a sighting of Supergirl buying kale salads at a tiny vegetarian restaurant Jess used to get Lena's lunches from when LuthorCorp was still in Metropolis, Jess thought that this was another secret that would be safe with her.


	45. Patience is a Virtue

J’onn came into the DEO early the next morning, as he often did when he was worried. All night long, he had felt M’gann’s tumultuous dream from across the city. In it, ever time the Daxamite soldiers shot a human, they turned green and joined the alien invasion, until it was only M’gann and her friends from the DEO who hadn’t been turned, a dozen people fighting a city, fighting a lose battle.

The DEO building was mostly back to its original shape, with the exception of the roof which still stood empty—the ruins of the old positron cannon long since cleaned up. He had just been down in Washington trying to get funding for a new one, but it hadn’t been approved yet. When you wanted something from a government, you had to be patient. Well, J’onn was over three hundred years old. He could be very patient.

The tired night watch saluted him as he made his way to his office. The sooner he started the day’s paperwork, the sooner he would be done.

At eight, he heard the shift change to the day watch, and she signed another form, stood, stretched, and ambled down to Agent Danvers’ lab. He could have hurried, but she wouldn’t have the equipment set up by the time he got there, so what would be the point?

Patience.

When he reached the lab, he saw M’gann pacing, Alex calmly setting out a pair of syringes and alcohol wipes.

Alex’s eyes flickered over his calm demeanor.

“Sir, you knew?”

“Not until M’gann did, Agent Danvers. We are bonded. Which arm do you want?”

“Your left.”

He sat and stretch out his left hand. She tied on the tourniquet, tapped the vein, injected the needle and slowly watched the tubing fill with his blood.

“Wait,” said M’gann. “I thought you said it was the blood of a White Martian. Why do you need his? And how did you know, J’onn. You’re not exactly bonded to Alex.”

“No, but I helped train her and we’ve worked together for a few years now. I know how she thinks. And she is thinking, if I’m not mistaken, about the side effect of turning the humans green.”

“Exactly,” said Alex, slowly untying the tourniquet. “It would make more sense if it was J’onn’s blood. So we need to be sure. And also, I want to see what part of the blood is the active agent, and I want to see how your blood is different from each other’s.”

She took M’gann’s blood next. “We’ll compare these to each other, to the blood samples of the victims, and to the pure sample of the drug. Then we’ll just see what all that tells us, if anything.”

M’gann looked scared as she held the gauze to the crook of her elbow. Alex placed tape over it gently, and patted her on the shoulder. “We’ll figure out what’s going on and we’ll make it right.” Her voice was strong and steady.

M’gann nodded hopefully, but J’onn could hear her inner turmoil.

“I’ll walk you out,” he said.

As they walked the hallways of the DEO, J’onn did his best to radiate confidence and calm.

M’gann said, “Thanks. But what if it’s true? What if it really is my blood that’s out there killing people?”

“A synthesized and augmented version of your blood,” said J’onn. “Maybe.”

“Probably.”

“Which is not on you, even if it’s true.”

“Isn’t it? Roulette didn’t kidnap me, like she did most of the others. I joined voluntarily, so I could, I don’t know, feel something, after centuries of just feeling numb.”

“Survivor’s guilt, M’gann. We’ve talked about this.”

“Doesn’t matter the reason I did it. It was a choice, and now people are dying because of it.”

“And they also chose to take this drug. So if it’s choice you’re focusing on—“

“J’onn. Thank you for trying to make me feel better. But I have to go. The beer truck is coming in twenty minutes…”

“All right. But M’gann. You know what the humans say: don’t be a stranger.”

She nodded and walked out. He sighed. He hated it too, the thought that it might be his own blood changing and killing the humans. It probably wasn’t, but…

He turned and headed back to the command center. Alex would figure it out, and then they would know, and then they could act.

Patience.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I've been teaching in a summer program and completely losing track of my story. If there are things you want to see, send me a prompt in the comments while I try to find my notes on future chapters: silly, fluffy, serious, combat, whatever.
> 
> Your comments make my day and keep my writing!


	46. Other Kinds of Collaboration

Alex hummed happily as she put the labeled blood samples through their paces. She loved being in the lab. Since the chaos of the Daxamite invasion, she had come to a renewed appreciation of the calm nature of labwork, the predictability of the scientific method.

She jumped at the sound of an amused voice.

“Agent Danvers, are you humming ‘Dancing Queen’?”

Alex turned to see Lena Luthor smiling at her. “Was I?”

“Don’t worry. It’s a good song, a gay anthem. Also, Queen Elizabeth’s favorite song, apparently.”

“Well, at least I’m in good company. What can I do for you, Lena?”

Lena sighed. “I’m concerned about Kara. I think she’s depressed.”

“We’ve all had a rough few months, but—“

“No, I mean clinically. She brought me lunch yesterday and she was very quiet, hardly said a word, looked sad the entire time. She ate a single kale salad—“

“She ate kale?”

“An then she said she hasn’t been hungry lately.”

Alex stared. “Wow. This could be serious.”

“Does the DEO have a psychologist or therapist who could diagnose her? And if they did, would SSRIs even work on an alien brain?”

“I don’t know,” said Alex slowly. “But my mother might. And J’onn might have some ideas…”

“If there’s anything I can do, anything that L-Corp can do, I want to help her.”

“I hate to say this, Lena, but the first thing you could do? Forgive her. She screwed up. She knows it. But she needs you, and I’m betting you need her too.”

“I do. I’ll go see her tonight. You’re right. I just—“

Alex took pity on her. “It hasn’t been easy for anybody. But you, me and Kara, we’ve had more of the trauma than everybody else combined. I know it’s hard. But we have to support each other.”

“You’re right.”

“I’ll talk to J’onn and Dr. Hamilton, and we’ll try to come up with a game plan. I’ll let you know if there’s anything you can do.”

“Thank you, Agent— Thank you, Alex.” Lena went to the door, but when she got there, she stopped and rested her head against it.”

“Lena, are you okay?”

“I just—“

“You look like you could use a hug.”

Lena laughed, but when she turned around, she had tears in her eyes. “I could use a hug.”

Alex strode over and embraced her and just held her until Lena relaxed into the hug and hugged her back, sighing, “Thank you.”

And Alex almost said, “That’s what sisters are for,” but she thought Lena might completely fall apart if she did, so instead she said, “Anytime you need one, just ask.”

Lena wiped the tears out of her eyes and left. Alex went back to her samples, shaking her head. Kara had been right about Lena all along.

The machine beeped and Alex turned to look at the computer monitor. “Huh. Well now, that explains a lot.”


	47. How These People Work

It helped to have a judge in your pocket.

The original idea had been Major Lane’s. She had come into the canteen the week before, wearing camos and looking grim. She had thrown herself into a chair at the table where Coulson, May and Vasquez were eating and said, “If only we could sweep through the entire fucking warehouse district, clearing one property at a time. Because you know that’s where the bad guys are. That’s always where they are!”

And Coulson and May had complained about jurisdictions, but Vasquez had gotten an evil gleam in her eye. She jumped up, hugged the major, chuckling, “I love Lucy!” and sprinted out of the room. Two hours later they had a search warrant for Daxamite g’bah spoors, and a mandate from the Centers for Disease Control to seek and destroy any signs of infestation. Vasquez looked very pleased with herself. Major Lane looked shocked.

Coulson turned to May and said, “Have I mentioned lately that I like how these people work? I really like how these people work.”

May just rolled her eyes.

Then they prepped two teams, May’s and Lane’s and Coulson and Winn had run the op, day after day, from the command center.

And the thing about search warrants was that you had to list the smallest thing you could reasonably be looking for. If you said you were looking for a tank, y ou couldn’t legally look in closets or drawers, where you might possibly find weapons, drugs or other small contraband.

But spoors? Spoors were small. The might be literally anywhere.

(And, coincidentally, they did find some in several of the warehouses that had been contaminated by the Daxamites. Lab techs in HazMat suits had come to clear the sites and Coulson had found himself humming the Minion banana song. May just rolled her eyes.)

On the fifth day, they found signs of an abandoned drug lab. At first Coulson had thought it was a meth lab, but the techs who came to check it out said no. But the evidence was enough for a new search warrant to be executed by the NCPD while the DEO kept searching the warehouses.

On the ninth day, they found what they were looking for, a lab with containers of synthesized Martian blood, a surprisingly amateur-looking still and cases of pill capsules. All of it looked like whoever had been working here had left in a hurry, probably hearing the agents at a warehouse nearby. Again, the DEO handed off the crime scene to the NCPD.

Then, once they knew the property, it took Winn little time to find the owner, a shell company that also owned another company, Sinclair Personnel Solutions, which had offices downtown.

“Got her!” shouted Winn.

Security camera footage from bot h areas showed Veronica Sinclair going in and out with a variety of companions, the ones at the office clearly green.

After a lengthy discussion between J’onn and Detective Sawyer about jurisdictions, they decided to have May’s team provide backup for the NCPD when Sawyer went to arrest Roulette.

And that turned out to be a good thing because Roulette’s people had alien weapons so May told the cops to duck and cover while she went in with her team and broke heads.

So when they got back to the DEO, Coulson saw the little smile of contentment she always got after a good fight. And when they dragged Roulette in for questioning, Coulson turned to May and said, “Is it me, or does that woman look really familiar?”

She nodded, clearly distracted. 

“Okay, May. What is it?”

“Not that that wasn’t a lot of fun today, but isn’t it time we headed home? It looks like they’ve got things under control again.”

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. I’ll talk to Henshaw. But before we go, I want to go to that alien bar again, and find out where they get that Sikarian ale.”

This time May didn’t roll her eyes. She liked it too.


	48. Our Work Takes Different Forms

The moment that they got Roulette into the interrogations room at the DEO, she asked for a lawyer.

Lucy smiled. "In cases where an alleged criminal is suspected of being an alien, we have at least twenty-four hours to test their DNA before we are forced to follow the protocols for human criminals."

"You know I'm human."

Lucy smiled, watching the woman's snake tattoo undulate as she moved her body in frustration, disliking the handcuffs. "I don't actually," said Lucy. "And as you have been caught on a foreign planet in the past, working with aliens to traffic human slaves, it stands to reason that you yourself might also be an alien. But if you'd like to give us a DNA sample to prove your status as human..."

"And once you have my DNA, you'll use it to connect me to other crimes."

"Why don't we talk about your crimes. Your most recent ones, at least. Sinclair Personnel Solutions."

"Placing temp workers is not a crime."

"Not ordinarily. But requiring in their contracts that they take performance-enhancing drugs is, particularly when those drugs haven't been approved by the FDA, and when their apparent side effect of turning humans green means that you then can claim that your temps are aliens, thus forcing the companies that hire them to pay more... So that last part is fraud. And the fact that the drug has been implicated in almost two dozen deaths? It's not looking good for you, Ms. Sinclair."

She shrugged. "They didn't have to sign the contract."

"And I know that you have powerful friends who have stepped in for you before, but they don't know you're here, so they can't help you now. And if we can't prove that you are human, well then, we're just going to be forced to keep you in alien containment."

"Fine. What do you want?"

"The names of everyone you worked with to make the drug. We already have the names of all your workers and the CDC is contacting them now to warn of the dangers of the drug and to see whether the effects can be reversed. But your pipeline needs to be shut down. You're killing people, Ms. Sinclair."

"Technically, I suppose they're actually killing themselves. And I'm helping National City rebuild. I'm doing the city a favor."

"And no doubt making a tidy profit while doing it."

"I'm a businesswoman, Major. I'm a problem solver."

"And now you're going to be contained indefinitely." Lucy stood and went to the door, where two black-clad agents stood. "Take her downstairs." She turned back to Roulette as she stood. "Enjoy your stay, Ms. Sinclair."

Lucy sighed and went back to the command center, where Maggie stood talking to J'onn and Vasquez. Supergirl was pacing. The Crinkle™ was deep.

"You okay, Supergirl?" asked Lucy.

Supergirl played with the edge of her cape. "They asked me to come in for a medical evaluation. Dr. Hamilton thinks I'm depressed. Eliza is trying to formulate an SSRI that will work on a Kryptonian. But I'm not sick. I don't need drugs."

Lucy looked at her friend and made a decision. "You know, I haven't had lunch yet. Go get changed and we'll go to Chinatown. On me."

//

Lucy drove. "You knew that I served in Afghanistan, right?"

"No, I didn't."

"Yeah. It was pretty bad. I saw some things. Horrors, really. Things humans did. Things aliens did. Hell, a few things I did myself. When I came back, I was a mess for years. I spent my first year in law school with my therapist trying desperately to come up with the right dose of the right drug. And when we finally got it right? I woke up one morning feeling strangely human again, like the elephant finally had gotten off my chest and walked away."

She parked the car and they got out.

Kara looked up at the sign over the restaurant. "Chili Duck?"

"My favorite place in National City. You're going to love it."

They walked in and Kara laughed. On every wall, there were large bright paintings of rubber ducks.

"It shouldn't work," said Lucy. "But it does. And the food's amazing."

The waitress came up smiling.

Lucy said, "Let's see. Two pad thais, a pad see ew, drunken noodles with beef and three orders of potstickers."

"How many more guests will be coming?"

"Oh, just us. We're hungry. We skipped breakfast."

The waitress gave her a funny look but took the order.

Lucy unfolded her napkin. "Vasquez has a similar story. I know. Probably most DEO agents do."

"Alex doesn't."

"No, in part because of the DEO and J'onn. And now she has Vasquez, and you've seen what a difference that has made, somebody loving you for who you are and accepting you? It helps me. I'm grateful to have Maggie in my life."

"I think I've lost Lena."

"You haven't It's going to be hard for a while, but hon, depression is real. It doesn't mean you're weak. It means you've had to be too strong for too long and your mind, your heart and soul, are tired and worn out. Your brain chemistry is messed up. It can be fixed."

"Sometimes I don't even know how to get out of bed in the morning."

"Been there, done that. It's no fun, but it can get better."

"Do you think Eliza can do it? Make a drug for me?"

"She won't be doing it alone. You know Alex will be all over this. Probably Lena too, and Vasquez. When the Danvers women decide to do something, I put my money on them every time."

"But Lena and Vasquez aren't Danvers women."

"Not yet, but I'm pretty sure that's just a technicality."

The food came.

"Comfort food, Little Danvers. Eat up."

When they got back to the DEO, Kara looked more like her usual self. Alex asked Lucy, "What did you do?"

"Spent some quality time with Little Danvers. Fed her potstickers and pad thai. Told her about my depression and SSRI."

Alex enveloped her in a hug. "Lucy, you are the best!"

"Damn, Danvers," said Lucy. "How is it that you sound so surprised?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Depression is real and it is mostly curable, with enough therapy and the right psychopharmaceuticals. And friends. If you feel like you haven't been happy in a long time, talk to your doctor. Ask for help. There are resources out there.  
> 2\. The restaurant they go to is actually a place in Boston. Very nice pad thai.


	49. Coping Mechanisms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little drunk Kara for fun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A long delayed chapter. I've been reeling from the Nazis taking over my country and our Chucklehead in Chief taunting North Korea with nuclear war. Also, I am currently on vacation/unemployed, so I am way less productive than I will be next month when school starts and I can focus on procrastinating on grading papers.

Kara worked through the afternoon, following up on the story about the (alleged) Vitamin G drug ring, including Veronica Sinclair's (alleged) connection through Sinclair Personnel Solutions, which had (allegedly) stipulated that hundreds of the temp workers (possibly as many as 712, according to the NCPD) take the drug. Kara hedged about the (alleged) side effects, asserting that (anonymous) officials believe the effects to be temporary. The legal teams of several construction companies were claiming no knowledge of this terrible tragedy, suing Sinclair Personnel Solutions for fraud, and working closely with the NCPD to bring justice for the victims.

Allegedly.

Kara put her head down on her desk. This kind of writing was mind-numbing. She tired to tell herself that it was important work, that things done in the dark needed to be brought to light. She'd watched House of Cards. She understood (in theory) that people could be greedy, power-hungry, and duplicitous. She knew from Barry Allen that out there in the multiverse, there were Earths where Olivia Marsden had actually not been elected president, that instead they had elected people like Frank Underwood, or worse, some reality TV blowhard who didn't even know when he himself was lying. In situations like that, good journalism provided the vigilance that healthy democracy required.

She knew. But...

Tears leaked from her eyes, inexplicably. It happened a lot lately. She didn't know why. Dr. Hamilton had suggested that perhaps the destruction of National City's buildings and infrastructure, parks and people reminded Kara Zor-El of the destruction of her home world, a destruction she had seen from the distance of space--a planet blowing up. Had she imagined it at a at a more local scale, the buildings coming apart, collapsing on her friends and family? Of course she had. But when you woke from seeing such sights in your mind, you could say it was only a dream. When you saw it by daylight, over the course of days and weeks, it was... much harder to dismiss.

And Kara Danvers had never known how to dismiss the pain of others. With her supersenses, it surrounded her, even on the most peaceful, crime-free day. So if she shed tears (Dr. Hamilton tried to persuade her), maybe that was a healthy response. Kara wasn't so sure. Growing up with Alex and Eliza, she hadn't seen it modeled for her.

She reread her article, hit Save and Print. She dragged herself to the copy room to pick up the article, knowing that now that it was printed, typos that had been invisible on her computer screen would suddenly appear. There was no helping it.

She was frowning at the article when she walked into a person standing outside her office. "Lena!" Those green eyes. A rush of warmth swept through her body. Lena was wearing a cranberry pencil skirt and short jacket with a black silk blouse that set off Lena's alabaster skin. She was a piece of art, a perfect sculpture, except breathing, her familiar heartbeat throbbing a bit faster just as Kara's was. 

"Kara, it's five l'clock. Why are you still at work?"

"Lena, it's not midnight. Why are you not still at work?"

Lena grinned. "Touché. Vasquez called me said our visiting friends are leaving and we're going to have a farewell party at Dollywood and Alex had said to ask me to feed you beforehand."

Kara shrugged. "I'm not really hungry. Sorry."

Lena's face fell. "Then what am I going to do with these?" She held up a paper bag and opened it to show Kara the contents.

"Starbucks chocolate-covered almond coffee ice cream? My favorite!"

"And Toronto Farms Maple Walnut..." Lip bite™. "I guess I'll have to eat them myself."

"But your diet!"

"Can't let them melt. Oh well. The new park over by Los Venidos Street was finished last week. The flowers are lovely. "I'll just sit on a bench and eat. Of course, you could just come and sit with me..."

"Well, if you put it that way..."

They stopped by Snapper's desk and Kara left her article on his chair so it wouldn't get lost in the sea of papers on the desk surface. Then they walked together arm-in-arm through the streets of National City.

Lena mused, "I love this city, with all the local granite faces of the smaller buildings, and the blue glass of the skyscrapers. It's so clean and all the buildings reflect the sunlight. Gotham is just the opposite, dark and dirty even on a summer day. It's like the whole city is a red-light zone. Metropolis is very Art Deco, so even the poorer areas are kind of stylish, like quality clothes that are old and warn but still classic."

Kara watched Lena as she talked, the way that jawline moved and her eyes flashed. She realized that she was staring and struggled to reply. "I'm usually so busy doing things when I travel that I don't notice that stuff."

Lena said, "I look precisely because it distracts me from the imminent boredom of the meetings when I'm traveling."

They reached the park. A mix of maples with green leaves, Japanese maples with dark red leaves and young transplanted oaks surrounded a small green space with a small fountain burbling at the center. Flowers lined the sidewalks.

They sat. Lena pulled out the quart tubs of ice cream, handing Kara the coffee and taking the maple walnut for herself. From her Gucci purse, she pulled out two metal spoons with the L-Corp logo on them. "Yeah, I don't do plastic."

The strong coffee flavor melted on Kara's tongue as she chewed the chocolate-covered almonds. Her mouth was happier than it had been in weeks. She ate all of hers, and finished the last of Lena's, ending with a happy sigh.

Lena leaned in and said conspiratorially, "I'm pretty sure this isn't what Alex meant by feeding you."

Kara licked her spoon. "Well, if you won't tell, I won't tell."

"Deal."

//

By the time they reached the bar, the gang was already there. James and Winn were playing darts in the corner. Alex and Vasquez were playing pool against Maggie and Lucy, and mostly winning. Lucy grumbled about being rusty and tried to convince J'onn that the DEO in the desert needed a pool table for advanced eye-hand coordination training for the agents. J'onn just smiled and shook his head.

"Do you play, Ms. Luthor?" J'onn asked.

"Please, J'onn, call me Lena. And yes, I played a bit in school."

Alex said "Play me next?"

"Its been a long time..."

Vasquez murmured in Alex's ear. Alex's eyes went wide.

Kara rolled her eyes. "They're making a bet. What Alex gets if she wins."

The Eyebrow™. Lena asked, "If I win, will you stay at my place tonight?"

Kara blushed. "You want me to?"

"I want you... to."

"Wow. Um. Okay."

Lena racked the balls and turned to Alex. "You break."

Alex placed the cue ball just off center. Her first shot sank a striped ball and then she went around the other side of the table and sank another. Her third shot missed.

Lena said, "I'm solids. Okay."

Her first shot sent a solid down the table and into the bottom corner pocket. Her second shot ricocheted off one side and landed in the top pocket. Her third shot went into one side pocket and her fourth went into the opposite.

She looked up to see Alex's stunned face. Vasquez was chuckling.

"Something funny, Agent?"

"No, ma'am! Not at all!"

Lena chalked her cue and considered the table. She winked at a fidgeting Kara. Then, one by one, Lena sank the rest of the solids, the eight ball last."

Alex pulled out her wallet and handed Vasquez a twenty.

"What was the bet?" asked Lucy.

Alex frowned, saying, "She said, 'Twenty bucks says Lena clears the table.' Really, Luthor? Haven't played in a while?"

Lena shrugged. "I was motivated."

Kara was staring and adjusting her glasses, blushing furiously.

Alex said, "I don't want to know."

Maggie smirked at Lucy. "You don't get that motivated for me. Sounds like there are some things I can learn from Little Danvers here."

Alex grabbed Vasquez's arm and dragged her back to the table where Winn was crowing at having beaten James three out of five games. M'gann came over with a tray of drinks.

J'onn followed her. "This round's on me. And Vasquez, remind me to give you a raise."

"Wouldn't say no, sir."

Kara took the metal cup that was gently fizzing. After two sips, she looked much looser. "Oh, hey! Mel's here. I'm gonna go say hi to my friend, Mel!"

J'onn turned to look. "Mel?"

Vasquez jumped up and put her arm around Kara's waist. "I don't think that's such a good--"

"Two Sikarian ales, M'gann, on me. Fer my friends Phil and Mel!"

Phil Coulson and Melinda May dragged two more chairs over to the booth. M'gann handed them fizzing drinks like Kara's and they toasted the group and drank.

Kara turned to Vasquez and said very seriously, "Mel's the Cavalry. She saves people on horses!"

Agent May turned to Phil. "Promise me that we never get Kara and Daisy in the same room together."

"That's a promise I can honestly make."

"Daisy?" said Kara. "I love daisies! They're so pretty. But not as pretty as Lena!"

Lena said, "I fed her, but apparently not enough. She did say she wasn't hungry."

Vasquez raised an eyebrow.

Alex groaned. "Don't tell me you fed her ice cream? That's not a good base for alien alcohol."

Lena shrugged. "Getting her to eat anything lately is a battle."

Kara giggled. "There were nuts! There was protein!"

Alex took out her wallet and handed Vasquez a ten. Vasquez kissed her cheek. "I'll go order some mozzarella sticks."

Lucy asked, "Do you two bet on everything?"

"Pfft. Of course not. Maybe. Yes. But I'm slowly learning not to bet against her predictions based on human nature."

"Do you ever win?"

Vasquez came back grinning. "She won my heart."

Kara giggled. "What are you doing with all the money you win off her?"

"I've got a piggy bank. Saving up for the wedding."

Kara squealed. "You're getting married? Can I be best person?"

Alex hugged her sister. "You're always my best person, Kara."

"And Lena can be the flower girl! She can throw daisies!"

M'gann brought over a plate piled high with steaming mozzarella sticks. "Kara, eat up. CEOs of multi-billion-dollar corporations generally don't serve as flower girls at weddings."

Lena laughed. "I can just see Lillian's face. She'd probably tell me I'm throwing the flowers wrong."

"Eliza would say I walked up the aisle wrong and why can't I walk more like Kara?" said Alex.

Lucy said, "My dad would say I'm brides-maiding wrong."

Vasquez sighed. "My mom would say I should wear a dress instead of a suit."

"Don't look at me," said Winn. "My mom's dead and my dad's in maximum security prison."

The table got quiet. Everybody took a drink.

"Well, that escalated quickly," commented May.

Lucy asked, "Don't your SHIELD agents have histories of family trauma?"

Coulson and May shared a look. "Oh, some of our agents could definitely give you a run for your money."

Kara watched Alex sadly. "Why do parents have to be so unfair sometimes?"

May shrugged. "Builds resilience."

Lena took a sip from Kara's drink and stood up. "My brother taught me this when I was honored as valedictorian at my high school and Lillian didn't even bother to show up:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.  
They may not mean to, but they do.  
They fill you with the faults they had  
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn  
By fools in old-style hats and coats,  
Who half the time were soppy-stern  
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.  
It deepens like a coastal shelf.  
Get out as early as you can,  
And don’t have any kids yourself."

"I like that," said Alex. "'Man hands on misery to man.'" She turned to Vasquez. "That's like that thing you taught me about how people like to spread their pain around."

"It's practically a first principle in threat assessment," said Vasquez.

"Well," said Coulson. "Look at it this way. If they didn't, we'd all be insurance salesmen."

They considered that. Everyone took a drink.

Kara waggled her finger at Lena. "Inshurenz salesmen don' wear capes!"

"No, dear, they don't."

"So this is waaay betterer."

"Okay, Kara, I'm going to call my driver and get you home to bed."

Kara beamed at Lena. "Bed with Leeena!"

Alex spat up her drink.

Lena said, "Yes, Alex. Next time we'll put something more substantial in her stomach. Duly noted."

Kara leaned on Lena's shoulder and giggled all the way out of the bar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem is "This Be the Verse" by Philip Larkin.


	50. A Calm without a Storm?

After work, when Vasquez and Alex got into Vasquez's Beetle, she asked, "Your place or mine?"

Alex yawned. "You choose."

"Yours then. If Kara's going to be hungover and/or in bed with Lena tomorrow morning, the odds of her walking in on us are far less." She put the car in gear, waved out the window to James and Winn and puttered across town to Alex's apartment.

Although Alex had seemed tired at work, once she entered her apartment she seemed to have a new spring to her step. She went to the kitchen and pulled out two pots, filling the smaller one with water. Vasquez didn't know what to make of it. She sat on the couch, pretending to check her email on her phone while watching Alex chop up an onion and a pepper and mushrooms, and saute them in the larger pan.

Finally, Vasquez couldn't stand it. She got up and walked over to Alex, who grinned at her. "What?"

"Is this Alex Takeout Queen Danvers... actually cooking?"

"I cook!"

"No, you don't. I cook. You wash up afterwards."

"Well, if you don't want any, you don't have to have any. And it's only sort of cooking. I'm using jarred spaghetti sauce."

"But... you cooked vegetables. And you're boiling water..."

"For the spaghetti. Except I think Kara finished off the last of it." She looked in the cupboard. "We have the squiggly ones. Are the squiggly ones okay?"

Vasquez hugged her from behind. "Fusilli? Whatever you make will be fantastic, Alex."

Alex leaned back into her, relaxing. "I never really wanted to cook for anybody before. Well, except for Kara."

"And to what do I owe this good fortune?"

"Well, you said that Kara wouldn't walk in on us..."

"Yeah. So?"

"Well, I just figured that you wanted to, um, do things for her not to walk in on?"

Vasquez closed her eyes and hugged Alex tighter. "So you are carb loading so that we have plenty of stamina for sex tonight?"

"I hadn't really thought about it like that. I just wanted, I don't know, to do something nice for you..."

Vasquez pulled Alex around to face her. Alex's eyes went wide. "Are you crying?"

"No!" said Vasquez. "Yes, maybe. Alex Heart of My Beating Heart Danvers, I know we said we were going to put off getting engaged, and I still think that's best, but, I mean, I Googled the name Danvers. It's Irish, isn't it?"

"Yeah. Dad's Irish and English. What does that have to do with dinner?"

"Al, do you know what a claddagh ring is?"

"The hands with the heart. To show affection."

"I thought we could get them for each other. So that anytime you look down at your hand, you'll be reminded that, well, you're loved."

Alex's jaw dropped but before she could reply, the water started to boil and she jumped to pour the pasta in, put the lid on and turn off the heat. She took a breathe, let it out and said, "I feel gay. Is this what it's like to feel gay?"

Vasquez stepped forward and ran her hand slowly up and down Alex's back. "I don't know. How do you feel?"

"Happy? Like if I were Kara, I'd be squeeing about now? But DEO agents don't squee. But then I look at you sometimes at the DEO, and you're all frowny and badass, and I think how much I love to see you smiling under me, or hell, on top of me, I don't care, and it's all just very confusing!"

"So, to clarify: you're questioning the validity of your emotions and emotional responses because, duh, gender norms, and turned on by a girl and at least if you're confused, you're very enthusiastic about it. Is that what I'm hearing?"

"Um. Yeah. That."

"Yep. Sounds pretty gay to me."

"Oh, good. I'm always worried that they're going to kick me out for being to straight."  
Vasquez tried to keep from laughing, but failed, and ended up snorting. "Oh, honey, that is never going to happen. And if they try, we can kick their asses. You and me. Together."

"Aw, Vasquez. You say the sweetest things."

FINIS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this is all of what I managed to fill in during summer hiatus, and now in an hour or so we will begin again cleaning up after the SG writers and their inevitable heteronormative fup-uckery. Wish me luck.


End file.
